Apple Pay Finally Heads to India After 12 Years

Apple is reportedly preparing to launch Apple Pay in India by the end of October, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. The service is available in more than 90 countries. India, the world's second-largest smartphone market, has never been one of them.

Axis Bank First

Apple Pay will reportedly launch with Axis Bank credit cards as its initial partner. Axis is India's fourth-largest credit card issuer, with 16.26 million active credit cards as of July 2026. The service will work the same way it does globally: tokenized card details stored on the iPhone for contactless payments via NFC, with Visa and Mastercard support at launch.

Apple is also in discussions with HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank — India's largest and third-largest private-sector banks respectively — though commercial terms have not been finalized. Neither Apple nor the three banks have officially confirmed the launch timeline.

Why It Took This Long

India's digital payments landscape is dominated by UPI, a government-backed instant payment system that processed 16.6 billion transactions in August 2026 alone. UPI is free, works across banks, and runs on QR codes rather than NFC — a fundamentally different model from Apple Pay's contactless card tap. Google Pay and PhonePe are the two largest UPI players, and together they handle the vast majority of retail digital payments.

Apple Pay's NFC approach targets a different segment: credit card holders making contactless purchases at POS terminals, primarily in urban retail and e-commerce. India's credit card market is growing fast — crossing 100 million active cards in 2025 — but remains a fraction of the debit and UPI volume.

What Changes

For the roughly 80 million iPhone users in India, Apple Pay adds wallet integration that was previously absent. Indian iPhone owners currently use third-party apps for digital payments rather than the system-level wallet Apple offers everywhere else. Adding Apple Pay brings India in line with the rest of the world and could accelerate NFC terminal adoption at retailers who want to serve the premium-spending iPhone demographic.

An October launch would come just weeks after the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max went on sale in India, giving Apple a natural on-ramp for the service during its peak sales period.