ETA Transact ‘26 Wrap-Up
The ETA Transact ’26 Conference in Atlanta has wrapped and what an important industry event it was. I have attended payment industry events for more decades than I care to admit and this year the ETA really delivered the goods. In the past, the ETA has consistently provided incremental technology and compliance improvements to the business annually to the ongoing benefit to its members. This year, however, Transact ’26 launched us into the future with numerous transformative applications of AI technology for payments that are merchant ready. In fact, the ETA states that 85% of the financial institutions are adopting AI tools by the end of the year. No more future hype: AI is HERE!
Clearly the hot Tech Zone topics covered agentic commerce for retail and distribution. Nima Montazeri, Chief Product Officer for Liberis US, discussed real world embedded finance services for SME’s, including underwriting, BNPL, purchase funding, and more. Vicky Bindra, CEO of Trulioo, was the keynote speaker on the topic of Trust in the Agentic Economy navigating the challenge of AI agents making purchases, approving invoices and moving money autonomously.
John Badovinac, Aurora Payments SVP of Embedded Commerce, told me how they use AI tools to speed their Arise Gateway agentic feature development. They can build “what if” financial models and rapid prototypes literally in one third the time previously required. Aurora views this advantage as a significant growth driver for their ISV customers.
Transact ’26 wasn’t all about AI. There were plenty of other significant advances in payment hardware as well. Biometric identity checkout is the new, fast and secure method of retail payments and public venue access. W;nk Systems is a modular platform that offers face, palm, voice, and liveness verification methods for retail checkout and age verification. It applies loyalty, scores fraud risk, and routes payments all in real-time applications via their secure gateway. The W;nk bio-solution was displayed on kiosks, Clover POS and multiple industry standard android payment terminals.
Speaking of payment terminals, all the global manufacturers were front and center displaying their latest terminals and kiosks. Newland NPT highlighted their sleek new X70 dual-screen ECR with embedded payments via insert, tap, swipe, facial recognition, and palm scan. Naomi Frias, Director of Strategic Partnerships, said, “the X70’s embedded modular payment hub offers virtually all payment acceptance options eliminating the need of external payment terminals.”
Nexgo exhibited the broad line of payment devices that they market around the globe. For their developers and resellers, they host an online marketplace offering the applications available for their 68 million deployed devices around the world. Patricia Love, COO of Nexgo stated that their developers can have their own private stores to market their apps utilizing the Nexgo global ecosystem.
In closing, there was a great deal more information provided by the speakers, panels and exhibitors than can be covered here. Suffice it to say that ETA did a masterful job organizing and presenting what continues to be a Vesuvian flow of payment technology innovations.
HATS OFF TO ETA!
Tom McCole is a veteran payment technology executive and business development consultant based in Atlanta.
