The €890M fine Google just received isn’t about search. It’s about payments.

As Frederic Yves Michel NOEL explains, the EU’s decision targets self-preferencing in Google’s payment services. And if you run a PSP, an EMI, or an acquirer, you should be reading the fine print very carefully.

Here’s why this matters for us: the same logic applies to any platform that controls both the marketplace and the payment rails. If you operate a marketplace where your own payment solution competes with third-party providers, you now have a regulatory precedent that says you cannot rank your own product higher without a clear, objective justification.

Compliance teams that focus only on AML and KYC are missing the bigger picture. The next audit won’t just look at transaction monitoring. It will look at your algorithms, your default settings, and your partner ranking logic.

In practice, I would not wait for a complaint to trigger an investigation. The cost of fixing this after the fact is not a fine—it’s the margin you lose from a forced restructuring of your product offering.

For PSPs with marketplace features, the key question is simple: can you prove, with data, that your routing logic treats your own payment method and a third-party one identically?

If you can’t, you have a compliance gap that is now a financial risk.

For payment teams, where is self-preferencing most likely to be hiding in your product today?

#PaymentCompliance #EMI #Fintech #RegTech #MarketplacePayments #AML #PaymentRegulation