Axis Bank has partnered with Apple Pay to launch in India. After months of intense negotiations with HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank, Axis Bank agreed to Apple’s conditions to secure a major PR win and potentially attract tech-forward, high-spending iPhone users from other Indian banks. India’s digital payment ecosystem runs on thin margins, and AXIS agreed to waive its fee, which HDFC and ICICI didn’t.

Additionally, Apple Pay users would bypass the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which accounts for roughly 84% of all digital transactions in India. Apple will launch the service purely as a card-tokenization service for Visa and Mastercard credit cards.

Apple Pay targets iOS users who prefer tapping their iPhones or Apple Watches at point-of-sale (POS) terminals without needing a PIN or OTP. This luxury play is a soft, heavily compromised launch that Axis Bank has made as a strategic marketing tool to pull premium customers from larger banks like HDFC and ICICI. For now, it does little for India’s mass-market UPI user.