Apple Pay is live in India with Axis Bank cards

Update, 30 September 2026. Apple Pay launched in India on 30 September 2026, ahead of the October window this post reported, with Axis Bank as the first banking partner. It supports eligible Visa and Mastercard credit cards issued by Axis, at contactless terminals and also in apps and online. Merchant support was enabled through Juspay, Cashfree, Mswipe, Paytm, PayU, Pine Labs, Razorpay and Worldline. The online checkout path this post said was absent does exist, so the conclusion that a D2C brand has no work to do now holds for a different reason: the gateways did the work. UPI and RuPay are still not supported, and neither launch report publishes a merchant discount rate. The five paragraphs below were written on 18 September, when the plan was an unconfirmed Reuters report, and are left as they were. The interchange split in the second paragraph, Apple seeking 15 to 20 basis points against banks proposing around 10, remains a Reuters report from unnamed sources and has not been confirmed.

Reuters, citing unnamed sources, reports that Apple may launch Apple Pay in India as early as next month, October 2026, with Axis Bank likely to be its first banking partner. Inc42 carried that report on 18 September 2026. Questions sent to Apple went unanswered at the time of publication and Axis Bank made no statement. Nothing here is confirmed by either company, and the whole item rests on unnamed sources.

On the reported plan, Axis Bank credit cards would be enabled first, with other lenders added later. Axis is India’s fourth largest credit card issuer, with around 16.26 million active credit cards in circulation as of July. Apple has also held discussions with HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank, but those two are yet to agree on commercial terms. The reported sticking point is the split of interchange, with Apple seeking 15 to 20 basis points and the banks proposing around 10.

Mechanically this is a contactless card wallet. Tokenised card details sit on an iPhone or an Apple Watch, the payment travels over NFC to a terminal, and the user authenticates with Face ID, Touch ID or a device passcode. UPI is not part of it. The report puts UPI at about 84 percent of digital payment volumes in India and does not name a source for that number.

Keep the commerce read short and honest. A card-based tap-to-pay wallet competes for payments at a physical terminal, which is a different animal from the UPI intent flow that carries most Indian checkout. At launch, as reported, it would cover one issuer’s credit cards on one hardware ecosystem, in a market where cards are a minority of transaction volume. There is nothing in the report about an online checkout integration, so a D2C brand has no work to do on the back of this.

The thing worth tracking is not the launch date, which may slip or never arrive as described. It is whether HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank agree terms. A single-issuer wallet reaches a narrow slice of buyers. A three-issuer wallet reaches a premium cohort large enough to notice in a high-ticket category. Until Apple or a bank says something on the record, this stays a report from unnamed sources, and it should be read that way.