Apple stops accepting card payments, switches to UPI and net banking

New Delhi: US tech giant Apple has stopped accepting debit and credit card payments for app purchases and subscriptions in India, to adhere to the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) guidelines on card storage and tokenisation. The company told users it will instead be supporting only Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and net banking transactions for in-app purchases locally.

“In light of upcoming Reserve Bank of India (RBI) regulations, starting June 1, credit and debit cards can no longer be used for purchases or subscriptions on the App store or other Apple services,” the company said.

Apple also said it will no longer store card information of Indian users on its file.


With the help of UPI and net banking, users can now load their Apple Wallet with a pre-determined amount to ensure that app subscriptions and purchases continue in a seamless manner.

The US-based technology firm said subscriptions will continue as long as users have sufficient balance.

In March 2020, the RBI barred payment aggregators and gateways to store customer card credentials in their data base. The central bank had set a deadline of June 30, 2021 for players to comply. In March, last year, the regulator extended this deadline by six months to December 31, 2021 and subsequently pushed it to June 30, 2022 after representations from several industry stakeholders.

Over the last year, several payment apps including Paytm, Razorpay as well as PhonePe have launched their tokenization solutions to help merchants avert any inconvenience caused to the customers during checkouts.