Apple Pay Officially Launches in India After a 12-Year Wait
More than a decade after its initial stateside debut, Apple Pay has officially launched in India, marking a major milestone for the tech giant’s global financial services footprint.
The highly anticipated rollout arrives with a phased approach to bank compatibility. At launch, the mobile payment service is exclusively available to Axis Bank customers holding Visa or Mastercard credit cards. Eligible users can now provision their cards directly into the Apple Wallet app, enabling seamless contactless (NFC) tap-to-pay transactions at physical retail terminals, as well as streamlined checkouts for online and in-app purchases.
Currently, the service is active across Apple’s primary mobile ecosystem, including the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. While Mac users are excluded from this initial rollout window, Apple has officially confirmed that macOS support is in the pipeline and will be deployed soon.
Addressing digital security in its official press release, Apple reiterated the platform’s stringent privacy architecture. To safeguard sensitive financial data, Apple Pay utilizes tokenization. This ensures that actual credit card numbers are never stored on the user’s physical device, kept on Apple’s cloud servers, or shared with merchants during a transaction, offering Indian consumers a highly secure alternative to traditional physical cards.
