AWS or Google Cloud for a Fintech or Embedded Finance Platform

The single biggest infrastructure decision in fintech is whether you're storing or transmitting card data yourself or routing it through a payment processor's tokenized vault, since that decision determines how much of your own environment falls inside PCI DSS scope. Wherever possible, keep raw card data out of your own infrastructure entirely and let a processor's tokenization handle it. Both AWS and Google Cloud can host a PCI-scoped environment, but a smaller scope on either platform is usually cheaper to audit and faster to change than a larger one, regardless of which cloud carries it.

Card authorizations and money movement need to keep working even when part of your stack is degraded, which usually means multi-AZ database failover and a tested plan for what happens when a downstream bank or processor is slow rather than down. Be specific about which availability tier a given payment flow needs, since chasing an unnecessarily high tier for a back-office reporting service wastes engineering effort you should be spending on the flows that actually move money¹.

In most software, a bad deploy means a bug report. In payments, it can mean a duplicated charge or a failed authorization a merchant notices immediately. Treat your change failure rate as a metric the whole engineering team is accountable for, not just a DevOps dashboard number, and require a tested rollback path for anything touching the payment flow before it ships². This discipline matters more in fintech than almost anywhere else, and it's independent of which cloud you're running it on.

A partner bank, card network, or state money transmitter licensing requirement will often specify where data can live and how it must be encrypted, and this constraint should narrow your cloud choice before your own preference does. Confirm which regions and encryption key management options each platform supports for your specific partner requirements before you build anything, since discovering a mismatch after launch means a costly migration under regulatory pressure.

Money transmitter licensing, sales tax on financial services, and specific state-by-state compliance requirements vary and change, and no cloud platform decision changes your underlying regulatory obligations. Confirm your specific licensing and compliance requirements with your attorney and accountant rather than inferring them from a cloud vendor's compliance marketing page, which describes what the platform supports, not what your particular business is required to do.

Confirm your payment processor's own infrastructure requirements first, since some processors have stronger integration tooling or lower latency on one cloud in specific regions. Map your actual PCI scope before comparing platforms. Test your failover plan for a slow downstream partner, not just a hard outage. And keep a clear paper trail of every compliance decision, since your bank partner and your auditor will both ask for it eventually, on either cloud.

A partner bank's risk committee reviewing your program will want more than a vendor's compliance page; they want to see that you understand your own environment well enough to answer follow-up questions without escalating to your infrastructure team mid-meeting. Prepare a plain-language summary of your architecture, your PCI scope, and your incident response process before that first review, and update it every time something material changes rather than presenting a stale document.

This preparation pays off beyond the first review. Bank partners who trust that you understand your own environment tend to move faster on subsequent approvals, like adding a new product or expanding into a new state, than ones who had to pull answers out of you the first time around.

Assign one person, not a rotating cast, to own this relationship and this documentation over time. A bank partner who has to re-explain context to a new point of contact every quarter starts to wonder how well the rest of your program is actually managed.

Bring these to the risk committee review:

• A plain-language summary of your architecture that a non-engineer on the committee can follow.
• A clear map of your PCI scope, showing what card data you store or transmit and what a processor's tokenized vault handles.
• Your incident response process, written down and tested rather than described from memory.
• Enough understanding of your own environment to answer follow-up questions without escalating to your infrastructure team mid-meeting.