3 min read
Apple Pay in Pakistan: what would have to be true for it to launch this year
Working backwards from a launch to the specific conditions it requires — and an honest assessment of which of them we have evidence for.
By the FounderDuels team ·
Rather than guess at a date, it is more useful to list what a launch requires and check which conditions we can actually see evidence for. Six things have to be true. We have decent evidence for two.
1. Apple has to want the market
Evidence: good. You do not write and localise NETWORK_NAME_PAYPAK strings into a shipping operating system for a country you have no plans for. The iOS 27 beta work is real, and it is specifically about Pakistan's domestic scheme rather than a generic capability.
2. Issuing banks have to be technically ready
Evidence: moderate. Screenshots of an Apple Pay option in the HBL app, plus reports of testing at Standard Chartered, Bank Alfalah and UBL. Feature flags leak and staged rollouts show non-functional options, so treat this as suggestive rather than settled. But several banks doing tokenisation work at once is not a coincidence.
3. Commercial terms have to be agreed
Evidence: none. This is the condition nobody can see, and in every comparable market it has been the one that determined the timeline. In India, Apple reportedly sought 15–20 basis points of interchange against bank counter-offers around 10, and the disagreement kept the launch pending for years — and when it finally went live, HDFC, ICICI and SBI Card were not part of it.
Pakistani interchange is thinner than India's. There is no public information about where these talks stand, or whether they exist.
4. The regulator has to approve
Evidence: none. The State Bank of Pakistan has said nothing. Tokenisation rules, customer-authentication requirements, contactless limits and data-residency questions all sit with the regulator. Silence here is not evidence either way, but it is silence.
5. A token service has to exist for the schemes involved
Evidence: partial. Visa and Mastercard run global token services, so cards on those schemes are the straightforward path. PayPak is the harder case: a domestic scheme needs its own token service, operated by 1LINK. The iOS 27 strings suggest Apple has done its side. Whether 1LINK's side is live is unknown.
6. Someone has to handle Apple Pay decryption in-market
Evidence: emerging. For in-app and web payments the encrypted payload must be decrypted by a party holding the right keys. EBANX's announcement on 24 September 2026 that it is entering Pakistan while bringing Apple Pay decryption in-house is the first concrete sign of that capability being built for this market.
Scoring it honestly
| Condition | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Apple wants the market | Good |
| Banks technically ready | Moderate |
| Commercial terms agreed | None |
| Regulator approval | None |
| Token service for the schemes | Partial |
| In-market decryption capability | Emerging |
Two of six are in decent shape. The two with no evidence at all — commercial terms and regulatory approval — are precisely the two that have historically decided when Apple Pay launches anywhere.
The most likely shape, if it happens
Based on India three weeks ago, and on every other emerging-market launch: one or two banks first, international schemes before PayPak, no Raast, and a quiet launch rather than a fanfare. Anyone promising you a date is telling you something they do not know.
What we will do
Keep this updated. The trigger that changes everything is Pakistan appearing on Apple's supported-countries page — until it does, the answer to "has Apple Pay launched in Pakistan?" is no.
Sources
- Countries and regions that support Apple Pay — Apple Support
- Raast: Pakistan's Instant Payment System — State Bank of Pakistan
- PayPak — 1LINK
- Electronic payments reach 3.7b transactions — The Express Tribune
- Apple Pay launch in India: cards at launch, UPI the big question — Business Standard
Published by FounderDuels. Corrections: [email protected]
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