Silicon Valley giant Apple has dropped its plans to launch Unified Payments Interface (UPI) based payments platform in India after facing troubles at regulatory authorities that has also stalled the plans of similar products by Amazon and WhatsApp.
Despite holding discussions with several leading lenders and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), an authority that manages UPI platform, Apple halted its plans to introduce Apple Pay in India.
According to the sources, Apple’s main worry is the recent data localisation rule introduced by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The brand is waiting for the regulatory authorities to shape up.
RBI’s data localisation rule requires companies to collect all their payments data only within India. This has hindered the plans of other multinational companies as well, including Mastercard, Visa, Amazon, WhatsApp and PayPal.
The recent data localisation rule is also troubling Google, that laid out aggressive plans for its UPI-linked payments platform in the country.
