MPC Interviews John Badovinac of Aurora Payments

 

John Badovinac, SVP Embedded Commerce, Aurora Payments john.badovinac@risewithaurora.com

 

How are you different than other brands in your space?

 

Our personal consultancy. Our Founder’s Framework is a practical, proven approach designed for SaaS founders to architect a payment business. It helps identify growth constraints, uncover revenue and margin opportunities, understand the real integration lift, and fully embed payments into the platform’s native sales and customer engagement workflows.

 

How would you describe your value proposition to prospective customers and channel partners?

 

Aurora helps software platforms and channel partners turn payments into a scalable business. We combine embedded payments technology with practical go-to-market expertise to help SaaS companies monetize payments inside their applications and enable ISOs and agents to deliver more value through software-driven commerce.

 

What recent challenges have your company’s leadership faced and how did you overcome them?

 

Our leadership team recognized that while our platform was strong, it wasn’t yet good enough for the future we’re building. To deliver faster integrations and more differentiated customer experiences, we doubled down on our engineering resources and added more than 20 engineers in the past 90 days. This investment is accelerating innovation and strengthening the Aurora platform for SaaS companies and channel partners building payments into their ecosystems.

 

What recent milestone have you achieved and why is it significant? 

 

In one of our recent four-week sprints, we built a best-in-class token import tool. This capability is critical for growing platforms that want to migrate off entry-level processors to a more partner-focused platform like Aurora. It allows stored payment methods to move seamlessly from the incumbent processor to Aurora with no disruption to recurring payment revenue. It’s also a great example of how our recent investment in engineering is already delivering real results.

 

What near-term opportunities will 2026 present to you and your team?

 

We’re expanding our ISV partner outreach and growing our team so we can share more about how our new developer tools and industry-leading digital enrollment process simplify and accelerate payments adoption for our partners.

 

What’s a key trend for your industry in 2026, and why do you think it’s important?

 

A key trend for 2026 is the continued growth of embedded finance, particularly working capital inside vertical SaaS platforms. As software platforms control more of the commerce workflow, they’re uniquely positioned to deliver financial services directly within their applications. The real opportunity is identifying the right financial use cases within each vertical—creating new revenue streams for platforms while giving merchants easier access to capital.