Apple Pay lands in India: Will it actually beat the local payment kings?
Apple has finally brought Apple Pay to the massive India market, but it is arriving at a party where everyone else is already dancing to the tune of UPI. Will this premium service actually stick, or is it just another expensive digital paperweight?
The rollout kicks off with Axis Bank as the sole partner, while giants like HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank are still playing hard to get. Apple is demanding a 0.2% transaction fee, which effectively eats up half the profit margin for most local banks, making the deal look less like a partnership and more like a ransom note.
Currently, the service only supports Visa and Mastercard, leaving the domestic RuPay network out in the cold. While Apple is herding big-name merchants like Zomato, Blinkit, and Reliance to get onboard, they face an uphill battle against UPI, the local system that lets people pay with just a phone number and a dream, requiring zero card overhead.
Apple is clearly betting on their 28% smartphone market share to force the ecosystem, especially with local production lines ramping up to churn out 35% of global iPhone inventory. It turns out that convincing a nation obsessed with instant, free, bank-agnostic transfers to switch to a card-dependent wallet that charges banks for existing is the ultimate tech flex.
Source: TechCrunch
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