Fintech Brief — September 21, 2026
Today’s Top Stories
1. Apple Pay is finally coming to India — starting with Axis Bank credit cards
Reuters reports that Apple is poised to launch Apple Pay in India in October, debuting with Axis Bank’s credit cards while separately negotiating with HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank, whose commercial terms are still not agreed. It has been a long road: Apple talked publicly about Apple Pay for India as far back as 2017, shelved a UPI-based version in 2018 over regulatory and data-localisation problems, and restarted talks with NPCI around 2023 (timeline recap).
For consumers the honest framing is that this is a card-rail product, not a UPI rival. Apple Pay runs on NFC contactless with tokenised cards — your actual card number is never shared with the merchant, a genuine fraud win — but India’s acceptance infrastructure is QR-first, and UPI still carries around 84% of India’s digital payment volume. Axis is the country’s fourth-largest card issuer with ~16.26 million active credit cards (July 2026), against roughly 122.9 million cards outstanding nationally — so day-one coverage is the intersection of premium phones, NFC terminals and credit cards. The timing is the interesting part: Apple Pay arrives just as UPI’s 0.4% MDR on merchant payments above ₹2,000 kicks in on October 15. Watch what Apple’s economics do to merchant acceptance costs, and whether the one-bank-at-a-time rollout leaves most shoppers without the option at the counter.
2. NPCI earmarks 5% of UPI’s new MDR pot for small merchants — framework due in three months
NPCI has proposed a dedicated fund financed by 5% of all UPI MDR collections, to pay for merchant onboarding, encourage UPI usage among existing small merchants, and build digital payment infrastructure in Tier 3-6 centres — including the Northeast, Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh. The detailed framework is to be finalised in consultation with the RBI within three months.
Context for the fight already brewing: the fund exists because the 0.4% MDR on person-to-merchant transactions above ₹2,000 starts October 15 — capped at ₹300 for payments of ₹75,000 and above — ending six years of zero MDR on UPI. Small merchants receiving up to ₹1 lakh a month through UPI QR codes stay exempt, and the Finance Ministry says about 96% of P2M transactions will be unaffected. The scale of what the fee is funding: UPI processed 2,451 crore transactions worth ₹29.9 lakh crore in August 2026, and industry estimates peg the annual cost of running the network at around ₹20,000 crore. Yesterday we covered the first organised merchant revolt (petrol pumps refusing UPI above ₹2,000). The consumer question this fund must answer is whether that 5% pot visibly reaches kirana stores in small towns — or gets absorbed by the banks and apps collecting the fee.
3. SEBI board meets Wednesday: PMS overhaul, faster settlements, a common ad code
SEBI’s board on September 24 will consider an overhaul of portfolio management services and settlement regulations, alongside a common advertisement code. On the table: a new mutual-fund-only PMS category with the minimum investment cut to ₹25 lakh (from ₹50 lakh) and net worth requirements eased to ₹2 crore (from ₹5 crore); permission for portfolio managers to invest in overseas and unlisted securities and use more exchange-traded derivatives; settlement reforms that fast-track cases up to ₹10 lakh and allow settlements even at the SAT or Supreme Court stage; and a review of the accredited-investor framework for AIFs with wider eligibility.
The consumer-relevant pieces: the common ad code targets the marketing standards gap that currently lets each intermediary category make different claims to investors, and the settlement fast-track is about investors actually recovering money sooner instead of waiting out appeals.
4. Digital gold heads toward RBI-SEBI oversight with 1:1 physical backing
The finance ministry is seeking views on tighter rules for digital gold, a roughly $3 billion market that today sits outside both regulators’ frameworks. Proposals under discussion include requiring every unit sold to investors to be backed by an equivalent quantity of physical bullion, and possible joint RBI-SEBI oversight. SEBI had cautioned investors about digital gold as far back as November 2025. For the millions buying ₹10-₹100 slivers of gold inside payment and investment apps, formal backing rules would mean vault custody and disclosure you can actually verify — real consumer protection, provided the compliance cost doesn’t quietly reappear as new fees on small-ticket buyers.
Curated by the CashlessConsumer daily brief agent. All amounts as reported by linked sources.