Apple Pay set to launch in India with Axis Bank, sources say

Apple is set to launch Apple Pay in India later Tuesday with Axis Bank as its initial banking partner, TechCrunch has learned, bringing its payments service to the world’s most populous country after years on the sidelines of a market dominated by UPI. The initial rollout will be limited, according to people familiar with the matter: Apple Pay will initially support eligible Axis Bank cards on Visa and Mastercard, but not India’s homegrown RuPay network, and acceptance will be restricted to merchants and payment terminals enabled for the service.

Unlike India’s ubiquitous Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which lets consumers make instant bank-to-bank payments without cards, Apple Pay is card-based and requires individual issuers and payment infrastructure providers to integrate with the service — making a broad rollout more complex. Apple’s commercial terms have also emerged as a sticking point with some of India’s largest banks, the people said: Apple is seeking a fee of about 20 basis points on transactions, a significant bite out of the roughly 40 to 50 basis points of margin in the payments layer, though the fee structure is broadly consistent with Apple Pay’s commercial model in other markets. HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and SBI Card are not expected to support Apple Pay at launch as negotiations over commercial terms continue, one person said. Apple, Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and SBI Card did not respond to requests for comment; Reuters had reported earlier this month that Apple was preparing to launch Apple Pay in India in October, starting with Axis Bank credit cards.

Apple Pay is entering a payments market that looks markedly different from card-heavy economies like the U.S. UPI, the state-backed system that lets consumers move money directly between bank accounts by scanning a QR code, handles the bulk of digital payments in India, and Apple Pay will initially address a much smaller card payments market by contrast. Still, Apple Pay could appeal to India’s growing base of iPhone users, who tend to be more affluent and more likely to use premium credit cards — customers who could make the service hard for banks to ignore, despite UPI’s dominance. Even if Apple Pay remains a niche service, the transaction fee would give Apple another way to monetize its growing iPhone user base 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 as well as contactless payments at supported terminals, the people said. An Apple Pay transaction could work at a terminal run by one acquiring bank but fail at another whose bank hasn’t enabled the service, which could make acceptance uneven during the initial rollout, even for customers with supported cards. The launch adds to Apple’s growing business in India, where it has been expanding iPhone sales, local manufacturing and its retail footprint: Apple accounted for 28% of India’s smartphone market by value in 2025, up from 23% a year earlier, according to Counterpoint Research. India already accounts for about a quarter of global iPhone production, a share that could rise to 30% to 35% over the next five years, Business Standard reported last month, citing an Indian government official.

Why it matters

The terms Apple is negotiating — a card-based service competing against UPI’s free, bank-to-bank rails — will test whether its fee structure can gain traction in a market where committing to Apple Pay isn’t a given even for India’s largest banks.