“Can Google remain the default consumer wallet and the cloud infrastructure layer for embedded finance without ever becoming a regulated financial entity itself?”
Google is not a fintech in the embedded-finance sense — its financial products (Google Pay, Google Pay for Business, Google Wallet) sit on top of bank/PSP partners rather than its own ledger. After abandoning the 'Plex' bank-account project in 2021, Google's strategy reverted to consumer wallet and merchant-facing payment surfaces (NFC, UPI in India, tokenized cards) plus lending facilitation in India through licensed third-party NBFCs. The strategic question now is how Google Pay competes with Apple Pay and how Apigee's Open Banking APIx positions Google Cloud as the infrastructure layer for other banks' embedded finance.