Apple Pay finally launches in India, starting with one bank

Only people with an eligible Axis Bank Visa or Mastercard credit card can use Apple Pay right now. India's own card network, RuPay, isn't part of the launch.

Why it matters: other big Indian banks aren't in yet either. HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and SBI Card are reportedly still negotiating terms with Apple. So even Apple Pay's own launch is smaller than a full national rollout, it's one bank, two card networks, and whichever stores have upgraded their payment terminals to accept it.

• Works with: Axis Bank Visa and Mastercard cards.
• Doesn't work with: RuPay cards, or any other Indian bank, for now.
• Where you can use it: only at terminals the merchant's own bank has enabled. Coverage varies store to store.

Apple Pay first launched in 2014. It's now live in roughly 100 countries and regions. India, the world's most populous country and one of Apple's fastest-growing markets, was a notable gap on that list until now.

Reports on the launch don't spell out exactly what held things up. But the timing lines up with something bigger: Apple now needs India more than it used to.

By the numbers: Apple held 28% of India's smartphone market by value in 2025. India already builds about a quarter of the world's iPhones, and that share could climb to 30-35% within five years. A country this important to Apple's supply chain and sales was always going to get Apple Pay eventually.

Here's the part that makes India different from every other Apple Pay launch. Most countries didn't already have a free, instant, nearly universal digital payment system before Apple Pay arrived. India does.

It's called UPI, and it lets people send money bank-to-bank instantly, usually by scanning a QR code, with no card needed at all. In May 2026 alone, UPI processed more than 23 billion transactions. Two apps, PhonePe and Google Pay, handle about 79% of that volume between them, and neither charges ordinary users a fee to send money.

In real life imagine a country where almost everyone already pays for their coffee by scanning a code with a free app, and then a new service shows up asking you to tap your phone instead, for a small fee nobody else charges. That's the sales pitch Apple Pay has to make in India.

The catch: Apple reportedly wants about 20 basis points per transaction. That's a small percentage, but it's real money in a market that has never had to pay for the convenience UPI already gives away.

Here's a detail worth clearing up: you, the person tapping your phone, don't see Apple's cut on your statement. Apple charges the card-issuing bank, not the shopper and not usually the merchant directly.

In most countries where Apple Pay operates, Apple takes somewhere around 0.15% of each transaction from the bank whose card is being used. That's the toll a bank like Axis Bank agrees to pay Apple in exchange for its cards working inside Apple Pay.

The big picture: that fee then becomes a cost the bank has to absorb or pass along somewhere, whether through card fees, interest rates, or simply accepting a smaller margin on that customer relationship. It's invisible to shoppers, but it's very visible to the banks deciding whether joining Apple Pay is worth it, which may help explain why HDFC, ICICI and SBI Card haven't signed on yet.

Apple isn't trying to replace UPI for everyday grocery runs. The more likely target is India's growing base of premium iPhone owners, people who already carry a credit card, travel internationally, and are used to tapping to pay everywhere else in the world.

Who's affected: that's a smaller, wealthier slice of India's population than UPI's mass-market user base. It overlaps heavily with Apple's own customers, the same people paying full price for a new iPhone likely already hold a premium credit card Apple Pay can plug into.

Apple's plan, based on how it has expanded in other countries, is to add more Indian banks over time through separate deals rather than one blanket rollout. That's the same slow, bank-by-bank pattern Apple has used almost everywhere else Apple Pay has launched.

There's a regulatory angle here too, and it may matter more than Apple's own sales pitch. PhonePe and Google Pay together handle roughly 79% of all UPI transaction volume in India, and regulators have noticed.

India's payments authority, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), has proposed capping any single UPI app at 30% of total transaction volume, specifically to spread that concentration across more players. The compliance deadline has already been pushed back once, to the end of 2026, showing just how hard that cap will be to enforce on two apps this dominant.

What's next: none of these rules are really built around Apple Pay, they're aimed at UPI's own internal competition problem. But a regulatory push toward more variety in India's payments market creates a slightly friendlier climate for outside players trying to get a foothold, even a small, fee-based one like Apple Pay.

The Reserve Bank of India has also been actively expanding the digital payments framework in other ways this year, including new rules on authentication and a draft proposal for special UPI-linked wallets that let foreign visitors load money for use while in the country. The regulatory environment is shifting toward more openness overall, not just toward Apple specifically.

• If you're an Axis Bank customer in India: you can try Apple Pay today, if your card is eligible and the store you're shopping at has updated its terminal.
• If you bank anywhere else in India: nothing changes yet. Keep using UPI or your existing card until your bank strikes its own deal with Apple.
• If you're outside India: this doesn't affect you directly, but it's a sign Apple still sees real room to grow Apple Pay, even in markets that already have their own popular alternative.
• If you're curious why this matters at all: it's a rare case of a Big Tech payment product launching into a market where the free, homegrown option is already winning.