Apple Pay Launches in India With Axis Bank as Sole Partner

Apple launches Apple Pay in India on Tuesday with Axis Bank as its only banking partner, ending years on the sidelines of the world's most populous payments market, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to TechCrunch.

The rollout starts narrow. Apple Pay will support eligible Axis Bank cards on Visa and Mastercard at launch, but not India's homegrown RuPay network, the people said. Acceptance will be restricted to merchants and payment terminals specifically enabled for the service.

The economics explain the limited lineup. Apple is seeking a fee of about 20 basis points on transactions, according to the people — a significant bite out of the roughly 40 to 50 basis points of margin available 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 expected to support Apple Pay at launch as negotiations over commercial terms continue, one of the people told TechCrunch. Apple, Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and SBI Card did not respond to requests for comment.

Reuters reported earlier this month that Apple was preparing to launch Apple Pay in India in October, starting with Axis Bank credit cards.

A card player in a UPI market

Apple Pay enters a market that looks markedly different from the United States and other card-heavy economies. India's digital payments boom runs largely on UPI, the state-backed Unified Payments Interface that lets consumers move money directly between bank accounts. Scanning a QR code to pay from a bank account has become commonplace. UPI handles the bulk of digital payments in India.

Apple Pay, by contrast, is card-based. The service requires individual issuers and payment infrastructure providers to integrate with it, which makes a broad rollout more complex than plugging into UPI. Apple Pay will initially address a much smaller card payments market.

Even so, the service could appeal to India's growing base of iPhone users, who tend to be more affluent and more likely to carry premium credit cards, the report notes. Those customers could make Apple Pay hard for banks to ignore, despite UPI's dominance.

Uneven acceptance at launch

At launch, eligible Axis Bank customers can 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.

Acceptance may prove patchy. An Apple Pay transaction could work at a terminal operated by an independent payments provider that has enabled the service but fail at another terminal whose acquiring bank has not, one of the people said. That unevenness could persist through the initial rollout, even for customers holding supported cards.

India's growing weight in Apple's business

The launch adds another piece to Apple's expanding Indian operations, which span iPhone sales, local manufacturing and retail. Apple accounted for 28% of India's smartphone market by value in 2025, up from 23% a year earlier, according to an earlier report by Counterpoint Research.

India already produces about a quarter of the world's iPhones. That share could rise to between 30% and 35% over the next five years, Indian English daily Business Standard reported last month, citing an Indian government official.

Even if Apple Pay remains a niche service, the economics could still make India meaningful for Apple. The roughly 20-basis-point transaction fee gives the company another way to monetize its growing iPhone base in the country, the people said. Whether HDFC, ICICI and SBI Card accept those terms will determine how far beyond niche Apple Pay can go.