Apple Pay launches in India, letting eligible Axis Bank Visa and Mastercard credit cardholders add their cards to Apple Wallet on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch (Dhruv Mohan/The Economic Times)

Apple Pay has launched in India, allowing eligible Axis Bank Visa and Mastercard credit cardholders to add their cards to Apple Wallet on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. The service is initially limited, with support for RuPay, India's domestic card network, and major banks such as HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, and SBI Card not yet available. According to TechCrunch, Apple is seeking a fee of about 20 basis points on transactions, which has been a point of contention with some Indian banks.

To use Apple Pay in India, users will need an Axis Bank credit card on the Visa or Mastercard network. Merchants and payment terminals will also need to have added Apple Pay support for the service to work. The launch comes nearly 12 years after Apple first announced Apple Pay, and it marks a significant expansion of the service into one of the world's most populous countries.

Apple Pay is a card-based service, which requires individual issuers and payment infrastructure providers to integrate with the service. This makes a broad rollout more complex compared to India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system, which handles approximately 84 percent of India's digital transaction volume.

Brief written by urgent.news from Techmeme, 9to5Mac, MacRumors, Tom's Guide, TechCrunch — 5 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.