By Tommy Avers, Vice President of ISV
I recently joined a panel at SEAA where my brother, Ryan Thiede, Director of ISV Sales at Celero Commerce, and a few other payments leaders dug into one of the biggest shifts in our industry: how traditional ISOs and merchant acquirers evolve into software-enabled businesses. As Celero’s VP of ISV, it’s a question I live in every day.
The line that stuck with me came from Derek Henn of Vivid Commerce: “Just because you built software doesn’t mean that you, as a payments company, become a software company overnight.”
He’s right. But here’s what I’d add: the inverse is just as true. Plenty of software companies bolt on payments and immediately assume they’re now payments experts. Both directions make the same mistake: they treat a new feature as if it were a new competency. It isn’t.
Why doesn’t adding payments make you a payments company (or vice versa)?
Building a great software product takes product management, UX, real development processes, customer success infrastructure, and a culture wired for continuous iteration. Building a great payments business takes underwriting, risk management, compliance, operational support, sponsor bank relationships, and a deep understanding of how money actually moves.
Neither one is earned by shipping a feature.
So what separates the companies that pull this off? The ones honest enough to name where they’re strong, where they’re weak, and where a partner closes the gap faster than building from scratch ever could.
It’s the approach we’ve taken at Celero Commerce. Rather than trying to become a software company overnight, we’ve built around purpose-built technology and partnerships designed for software companies and ISVs.
Should your sales team become software experts?
This came up when Ryan talked about helping traditional ISO sales teams sell software. These are people trained to sell payments. Asking them to suddenly become software consultants usually creates more problems than it solves. The fix isn’t turning everyone into a software expert, it’s building a framework where specialists support the sale while salespeople keep operating in their strengths. Too many organizations force everyone into the same mold instead of letting specialists do what they do best.
Where does AI actually create leverage?
Because no panel in 2026 escapes it, we got to AI. Everyone agreed on the opportunity. What stood out was the insistence on keeping the human element. Giuseppe Marzelli of Ovation CXM noted that people still care about relationships, even when you’re deploying impressive new technology. John Badovinac of Flute built on that with agentic AI — inserting human judgment at the right moments.
That’s the right framing. The question was never whether AI will change how we build, sell, and support. It already has. The real question is where human judgment creates leverage. The winners won’t be the ones who automate everything. They’ll be the ones who know where automation creates efficiency and where human expertise creates trust.
Where do the best product ideas come from?
My favorite practical takeaway came from John: start with curiosity. Talk to merchants. Ask them what task they dread every week, what eats too much time, what they’d gladly pay to make disappear. For all the noise around AI and innovation, the best product ideas still come from real customer problems.
The real ISO-to-ISV blueprint
The journey isn’t about becoming something completely different. It’s about expanding what you can do while staying honest about what you do best.
The companies that win this transition won’t win because they built software. They’ll win because they built software that solves real problems, partnered where it made sense, and stayed relentlessly focused on the merchants they serve.
That’s a blueprint worth paying attention to, and also the thinking behind Celero Fusion, the platform we built so software companies and ISVs can offer payments without having to become payments companies themselves.
Tommy Avers
Vice President of ISV
(817)-999-9020
tommya@celerocommerce.com
www.celerocommerce.com