ETA TRANSACT 2026: Dates, Location, and Scale
ETA TRANSACT 2026 runs March 18 to 20, 2026 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia. A third-party conference-intelligence directory estimates 2,000 to 5,000 attendees, described as professionals in vertical software, and 75 to 199 exhibitors, with typical exhibitor booth costs running $15,000 to $40,000. That directory is not the official ETA event site, so its attendee and exhibitor figures read as bucketed estimates, not an ETA-published headcount, and should be treated as directional rather than exact.
No specific registration dollar price was recoverable in this research; the listing this guide draws from showed only a relative premium-tier indicator rather than an actual figure. Confirm current registration pricing directly before budgeting a trip around it.
Why This Floor Is Worth an ISO’s Time
The Electronic Transactions Association, the trade group that hosts TRANSACT, represents more than 500 member companies spanning agile startups to influential financial institutions, a list that includes Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and American Express by name. That scale reflects the trade association most of the payments industry’s largest and smallest players already belong to, which is exactly why its flagship event draws the volume of attendees and exhibitors described above.
For an ISO, that concentration means a single trip can put a rep in the same room as prospective referral partners, technology vendors, sponsor-bank contacts, and merchants evaluating new processing relationships, all without the cold outreach it would normally take to reach that same mix of people separately.
What a $15,000 to $40,000 Booth Signals About the Room
Booth costs in the $15,000 to $40,000 range are not a small commitment, and that spend is itself a useful signal: the companies paying for floor space at TRANSACT are betting real budget on reaching this exact audience. An ISO deciding whether to exhibit, sponsor, or simply attend and work the floor is making the same calculation on a different scale.
Working the floor without a booth is a legitimate strategy, not a consolation prize, since a badge alone gets a rep into every session, every hallway conversation, and every hosted networking event the exhibitors themselves are paying to be near.
Working the Floor Without Paying for a Booth
Practitioner guidance, not a cited statistic: a rep working TRANSACT without exhibiting gets the most value from targeting specific sessions relevant to their own specialty, whether that is high-risk boarding, PayFac technology, or a particular vertical, and staying afterward for the hallway conversations that follow, where genuine relationship-building tends to happen more than at the booths themselves.
Collecting contact information deliberately, not passively, asking directly for a card or a LinkedIn connection rather than hoping a badge scan alone produces a usable lead, is the difference between a conference that generates real follow-up and one that generates a stack of names nobody remembers by the following week.
Following Up Before a Competitor Gets There First
The value of a conference contact list decays fast. A prospect who had a genuine conversation on the floor in Atlanta is a warm lead for perhaps a week, then a cooling one, and every other exhibitor and attendee who talked to that same prospect is racing the same clock.
Human + AI SDRs can follow up on a trade show contact list over SMS within days of the event, referencing the actual conversation that happened on the floor, so a lead generated at real cost does not go cold before anyone gets back to it.
What this means for you
- ETA TRANSACT 2026 runs March 18 to 20 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, with an estimated 2,000 to 5,000 attendees and 75 to 199 exhibitors, per a third-party conference directory, not an ETA-published count.
- ETA itself represents more than 500 member companies, including Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and American Express, real context for why the flagship conference floor concentrates so much of the industry in one place.
- A badge without a booth is a legitimate prospecting strategy: session attendance and deliberate contact collection matter more than exhibitor spend for a rep working the floor rather than staffing it.
Sources
The external data in this guide draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.