Apple is also looking strategically to venture into the booming digital payment industry in India, with which the company is collaborating with leading banking institutions to roll out and implement Apple Pay by mid-2026.
The initiative can help the iPhone company greatly enhance its presence in the largest and fastest-growing major economy in the world, with mobile transactions booming 45% last year, making $16.7 billion UPI payments in the first month of January 2026, alarmingly, according to the National Payments Corporation of India.
Key Bank Partners
According to Bengaluru Guardian, Apple is currently in the process of advanced negotiations with ICICI Bank (ICBK.NS), HDFC Bank (HDBK.NS), and Axis Bank (AXBK.NS)- the major Indian banks in terms of card issuance, which make up more than 30%. of card issuance. These partnerships are done to integrate Apple Pay into the Visa and Mastercard systems by bypassing the influence of UPI.
The consortium is headed by HDFC, which is the largest Indian-based private lender in terms of market capitalization, and stands at 13.5 lakh crore as of February 23, 2026; ICICI and Axis bring their vast ATM and merchant networks. According to India, in 2025, the payments market reached a value of 3.2 trillion of the transaction value, and according to RBI data, cards took 12% of the market against 84% of UPI. The high-end customer is also an entry point, as the 28-year-over-year iPhone shipment growth of 10-million units shows the target of the high-end customer segment in 2025, as per a survey conducted by Counterpoint Research.
Strategic Push
Airhead (2018) posits that Apple’s interest in India is based on manufacturing cost advantages; more than 25 billion iPhones were produced on the domestic level last year, and the App Store earned over $28.33 lakh crore. However, there are still regulatory barriers: the RBI needs to have data localization, and the NPCI limits the market share of third-party applications to 30%.
Satish Meena, the Vice President of Forrester, sees Apple Pay capturing 5-7% of the premium card sphere in India in two years, both because of a user-friendly experience and loyalty rewards, which is optimistic among the analysts.
Market Impact
Importantly, in this move, Apple competes with Google Pay (40% in UPI) and PhonePe. Victory will depend on the growth of the NFC application, which is now only 15% of the POS machines in use, and on pressures of tariffs that are bloating the iPhone prices by 10 to 15%. According to the estimates, as of mid-2026, with speedy bank onboarding, Apple Pay could gain 20 million users, which would add 2-3% to the service revenue of AAPL. On the other hand, failure might lead to stagnation in a UPI-based market; however, the ecosystem integration of Apple might eventually lead to disruptive market penetration.
