We have been using PayPal (with Aware) for the last few years but have found it restrictive for subscriptions and otherwise has shortcomings such as directing customers away from your site to complete payment etc.
Therefore we went looking for payment gateway and merchant account solution that was compatible with Aware. Braintreepayments.com recently launched in Australia, they are popular in the US. We found them to be very cost effective compared to other solutions in Australia (eg getting a bank merchant account plus a gateway provider). When you apply to Braintree you end up with a NAB merchant account. The application process is quite long but that's Australian financial services for you.
We asked (and paid) Aware Support to develop a plugin which we have now finished testing and works very well. It is easy to install and processes transactions with a few BOs and some simple rules (I think it is actually much easier than the PayPal examples). It doesn't do every transaction on the Braintree API but it does the main 3 or 4 you would need - taking a payment, adding a customer to the vault and updating a customer's details in the vault.
If you contact support I imagine they would be able to provide you a price for utilising the plugin. I know there has been some talk on the forums about how Payment Gateway integration is a pain and difficult etc, but our experience so far with Support and Braintree developing and using the plugin has been great.
I'm just writing this to allow other Aware users to piggy back on our homework and research. Hope this helps you.
