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Apple began rolling out Apple Pay in India on Tuesday, TechCrunch first reported. Its first banking partner is Axis Bank, the third largest private lender in the country. The move brings the company’s payments service to the world’s most populous country after years of delays in a market dominated by the government-backed United Payments Interface (UPI).
The initial rollout is limited. Apple Pay supports eligible Axis Bank cards on Visa and Mastercard, but not India’s native RuPay network. Acceptance is also limited to merchants and payment terminals that have been activated for the service.
Apple said the service is accepted by “millions of merchants” across India, including Blinkit, Croma, Ixigo, Reliance, Tata 1mg and Zomato brands. The company has worked with payment service providers such as Cashfree, JusPay, Mswipe, Paytm, PayU, Pine Labs, Razorpay and Worldline to enable Apple Pay acceptance.
Unlike India’s ubiquitous Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system, which allows consumers to make instant bank-to-bank payments without relying on cards, Apple Pay is card-based and requires individual issuers and payment infrastructure providers to integrate with the service. This makes a broad rollout more complex. Apple’s terms and conditions have also emerged as a point of contention at some of India’s largest banks, the people said.
According to the information, Apple is targeting a fee of around 20 basis points (0.2%) on transactions, a significant reduction from the approximately 40 to 50 basis points (0.4% to 0.5%) margin in the payments layer. The fee structure is broadly consistent with Apple Pay’s commercial model in other markets, the people said. HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and SBI Card are not supporting Apple Pay at launch as negotiations on commercial terms are still ongoing, one of the respondents told TechCrunch.
Apple, Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and SBI Card did not respond to requests for comments on the launch. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Apple is preparing to launch Apple Pay in India in October, starting with Axis Bank credit cards.
Apple Pay has entered a payments market that is significantly different from the US and other card-heavy economies. India’s digital payments boom has been driven largely by UPI, the government-backed system that allows consumers to transfer money directly between bank accounts.
UPI handles the majority of digital payments in India, where scanning a QR code to pay directly from a bank account is now common practice. In contrast, Apple Pay initially addresses a much smaller market for card payments.
Still, Apple Pay could be attractive to India’s growing number of iPhone users, who tend to be wealthier and more likely to use premium credit cards. These customers could make it difficult for banks to ignore the service despite UPI’s dominance.
Even though Apple Pay remains a niche service, India could still be important for Apple for economic reasons. The transaction fee the iPhone maker would charge would give it another way to monetize its growing base of iPhone users in the country, the people said.
At launch, eligible Axis Bank customers will be able to add their credit cards to Apple’s Wallet app and use Apple Pay for online purchases and contactless payments at supported terminals, the people said.
An Apple Pay transaction could work on a terminal operated by an independent payment processor that has activated the service but fail on another terminal whose acquiring bank has not, one of the people said. This could lead to uneven adoption at initial launch, even among customers with supported cards.
The launch is another contribution to Apple’s growing business in India, where the company has expanded iPhone sales, local manufacturing and its retail presence. According to an earlier report by Counterpoint Research, Apple accounted for 28% of the Indian smartphone market by value in 2025, up from 23% the previous year.
India already accounts for about a quarter of global iPhone production, and that share could rise to 30 to 35 percent in the next five years, the Indian English daily Business Standard reported last month, citing an Indian government official.
Update: This story, originally published Tuesday morning, has been updated to clarify that the launch is now underway.
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