As the digital payments space heats up in India, Apple is also looking at entering this market through the launch of its Apple Pay service. Apple has been rapidly growing its presence in India. Apple’s senior vice president for internet software and services Eddy Cue was in India over the weekend to discuss various possibilities to grow its business in India.
Eddy told Economic Times that it plans to launch Apple Pay in India but doesn’t care about the payment mechanism itself.
As per a Mint report, Apple will look to partner and integrate its payments service with established players in the country like Paytm, rather than build a new payments solution from scratch.
“Apple Pay isn’t trying to come up with a brand new payment vehicle, so the fact that people like Paytm are doing well here is great. The fact that credit cards are doing well here is great. We just need to integrate with the popular ones and make the service available,” Eddy told Mint.
Eddy also announced the setting up of two Mac Labs at AR Rahman’s KM Music Conservatories. Apple reportedly has many plans with music in India, also in terms of bringing Indian music outside to the rest of the world.
“We have been working with new artists and existing artists to do that. More importantly, we wanted to announce the work we are doing with AR (Rahman) on the KM Music conservatory with kids. It was great to set up a couple of labs with all the Apple equipment, creating from scholarships,” Eddy told ET.
Apple is also looking at expanding its maps service by leveraging India’s technology and engineering talent in a big way.
“We have really invested a lot in Maps and one of the areas that we thought was a great opportunity to invest in was here. We now have over 4,000 people working on Apple Maps. We wanted a place where we could scale fast, but also had the technical capabilities and chops to do the work really, really well. Honestly, it has surpassed our expectations by any measure. When you look at the quality of people coming in, it’s better than what we thought,” Eddy told Mint.