Apple Pay Will Not Launch In India – 2 Major Reasons Why Apple Took This Decision!

Apple users in these countries Australia, Canada, Mainland China, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, the US, and Taiwan use Apple Pay for a contactless payment mechanism.

But sadly, Indians won’t be able to do the same.

In an anti-Digital India move, Apple, world’s largest technology company has decided not to launch their flagship cashless payment system Apple Pay in India.

But why did Apple make this decision?

Keep reading to find out the truth!

Apple To India: Sorry No Apple Pay For You

As per reports coming in, Apple has decided to put on hold their plans to roll out Apple Pay services in India.

Apple has earlier announced that Apple Pay would be UPI based, and would provide contactless payment services in the country.

However, complicated Red Tape, and regulatory roadblocks in India has now forced Apple to stop their expansion plan and go back to the drawing board.

An unnamed person said, “Apple will not launch payments in India yet. They are waiting to see how the regulatory landscape shapes up,”

Earlier, Amazon and Whatsapp too halted their plans to introduce their own digital payment services in India, due to the same reasons.

2 Reasons Why Apple Decided Not To Launch Apple Pay in India

Local Storage Of Data

In April this year, RBI surprised entire Digital ecosystem in India, by declaring that every wallet and financial company should store data of Indians, inside India.

At that time, $2 trillion worth of digital transactions were being processed in India.

In their notification, RBI stated, “In order to have unfettered access to all payment data for supervisory purposes, it has been decided that all payment system operators will ensure that data related to payment systems operated by them are stored only inside the country within a period of six months.”

In August this year, Govt launched a new Cloud Computing Policy for India, which again forced every Internet and digital company to locally store their data in India.

This might be one of the strongest reasons why Apple is now hesitant to launch their Apple Pay in India – Apple cannot right now store data of Indians in India, as they don’t have any datacenter.

Contactless, PIN-less Payments Not Allowed

Another major reason is NPCI’s decision not to allow PIN-less payments by Apple Pay.

Apple Pay operates a contactless payment system, wherein there is no requirement of any PIN or OTP. Just a fingerprint authorization is enough to process the payment.

Whereas NPCI mandates that a 4 or 6 digit PIN to authorize the payments, and is not allowing biometric access based payments.

This can be another major reason why Apple Pay now wants to wait, instead of right away launching their Apple Pay services.

At a time when digital payments are experiencing an all-time surge in India, with UPI witnessing 900% growth, and 30 crore monthly transactions, this is indeed a bad news for Digital India.

We will keep you updated, as receive more updates.