Aurora Payments

At the ETA Transact ’26 Payments Conference last week, I spent time with an industry veteran John Badovnac. He is the Senior Vice President of Embedded Commerce for Aurora Payments in Tempe, Arizona. Aurora is a private equity backed, digital payment services gateway company providing market leading payment technologies. They serve 27,000 merchants, process $120+ million, and $12 Billion in annual processing.

Embedded Commerce is a broad term covering the integration of varied transaction services to include: payments, lending, insurance services, digital wallets, identity verification and other non-financial services as well. This capability is attributable to the advent of AI technology. Aurora’s vision is to provide a broad array of value-added embedded services for their ISO and ISV resellers as a significant market differentiator.

John is responsible for creating the AI engagement framework for their ISO and ISV partners on their Arise Gateway. In his spare time, John is a competitive cyclist. His need for speed clearly carries over into his work life. He stated how their 20 in-house engineers are using AI tools to reduce integration feature development times that used to take 9 months down to 2-3 months. They are also able to create financial models and “what-if” tools in mere days. Aurora’s AI development designs enable their reseller customers to integrate the new features quickly and offer incredible new capabilities for their merchants. That makes John very happy and keeps Aurora out front!

The tech world at large, as well as the payments industry, has promised the benefits of AI for the past several years. The ETA Transact Conference demonstrated the execution tools are here now and living up to the promises made. The future hype is over, and we can see the benefits in real time.