It’s been over 10 years since Apple Pay launched in the US in 2014, and has now expanded to 89 countries. India was not one of them. That is about to change soon and is likely to rattle UPI giants like Google Pay and Paytm.
According to a Bloomberg report, Apple is in advanced talks with HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Axis Bank, as well as card networks Visa and Mastercard, targeting a mid-2026 launch.
Why didn’t Apple Pay come to India sooner?
As far back as 2017, Apple’s services chief Eddy Cue had said publicly, “We absolutely want to bring Apple Pay to the market [in India].” What stopped it was regulation. India’s payments system required SMS-based one-time passwords (OTP) for authentication.
This mechanism didn’t fit Apple Pay’s Face ID and Touch ID model. The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) new rules, introduced late last year, now permit fingerprint and facial recognition for digital transactions, effectively opening Apple’s authentication model to India for the first time.
Dual approach for India
UPI dominates digital payments in India, and Apple Pay is expected to support it alongside card-based payments. This dual approach would make it a full-service wallet rather than a card-only product in a market where UPI has made cards feel almost secondary.
The competition is immense, though. Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm and Amazon Pay are deeply entrenched. But for Apple, it is less about payments and more about services revenue. The company takes a cut of every Apple Pay transaction, according to Bloomberg, and with over 750 million smartphone users, India is too large a gateway to ignore.Since 2022, Apple had not even been accepting credit or debit cards in India. That it is now negotiating directly with the country’s biggest banks marks a genuine shift.
