In most industries, vendors talk about being “customer centric.”
In fiscalization, that is not enough. If you are responsible for a retailer’s compliance, you must also be neutral – financially, technologically and politically. Without that neutrality, every project looks successful right up to the moment when the risk materializes.
I have spent more than twenty years building a company that lives in exactly this space: between retailers, POS vendors, hardware manufacturers and tax authorities in more than two dozen countries. Over the years I have seen brilliant solutions fail, not because of technology or legal changes, but because the vendor had become dependent on someone else’s agenda.
When you operate in fiscalization, neutrality is not a moral luxury. It is a business requirement.
The risk of financial dependence
The first form of dependence is the most obvious: money.
Many solution providers finance their growth through investors who have their own strategic goals. That is normal and, in principle, not a problem. It becomes dangerous when the investor’s objectives are not aligned with the long-term needs of retailers and POS vendors.
If your fiscalization provider depends on a single large investor, the pressure for short-term returns can be extreme. The company starts to optimise for valuation, not for resilience. Pricing models are pushed up quickly. Development resources are redirected to functions that are easy to market, not necessarily to the hard, boring work of maintaining compliance in many different countries.
In fiscalization, however, value is created over decades, not quarters. Retailers need a partner who will still be there when the next law change arrives five years from now. If a vendor’s survival depends on one investor’s mood or one funding round, the retailer is effectively outsourcing compliance to a very fragile balance sheet.
Growing a company more slowly, with controlled financial risk and diversified revenue, is less glamorous. But it is the only way to keep decisions independent and focused on the customer’s risk, not on the investor’s exit.
When the fiscal vendor belongs to the POS world
The second dependence is subtler but just as critical: technological dependence on a single POS hardware or software provider.
It is easy to understand why a POS company would like to “own” its fiscalization partner. If they can keep that layer under their control, they can expand faster into fiscal countries and offer a tightly integrated solution. For them, it looks like a strategic advantage.
For everyone else in the market, it looks like a trap.
No POS vendor wants to depend on a competitor for such a sensitive component. Fiscalization touches the deepest parts of the application: transaction logic, receipt structure, error handling, data security. If the fiscal provider is controlled by a rival POS company – or by the same investor – the situation quickly becomes uncomfortable. You are sharing highly sensitive information about your architecture and your roadmap with someone who competes with you for the same retailers.
Sometimes these dependencies are visible: the POS vendor openly owns the fiscalization company. Sometimes they are hidden: the same private equity fund quietly controls both, or an exclusive partnership creates the same effect. From the outside, it can be hard to see.
Technically, a POS-controlled fiscal layer also tends to create fragmentation. The solution is optimised for one stack, one way of thinking, one architecture. Adapting it to another POS can become complex, expensive or simply unattractive. In the end, the market gets a patchwork of proprietary solutions instead of a neutral fiscalization layer that works across many systems.
A neutral fiscal middleware, by contrast, can sit between any POS and any government-authorised infrastructure. Retailers with multiple POS systems, and POS vendors who want to expand globally, both benefit from a single, standardised integration instead of a dozen custom ones. Development and maintenance costs drop dramatically when you build and test one fiscal interface instead of many.
The most dangerous dependence: politics
The third dependence is the most tempting – and the most dangerous: political dependence.
The biggest immediate profits in fiscalization appear when a vendor becomes, in practice, a monopolist. Many new fiscal laws are implemented with a very small number of certified devices or cloud systems, sometimes only one or two. When every retailer in a country must buy the same fiscal printer or connect to the same cloud platform, the volumes are huge and the margins can be extremely attractive.
It is no secret how such positions are often achieved. To be among these very few authorised providers, a company must be close to the ruling power in that country. You do not just build good technology; you become part of the political game.
At first, this looks like a dream business model. Revenue is locked in by law. Competition is limited or non-existent. But the risk curve points sharply downwards. Governments and coalitions change. New parties come to power with their own favourite suppliers. Laws are rewritten. Suddenly the monopoly becomes a target, not a privilege.
I have seen this pattern several times. Companies that were celebrated as “strategic partners of the government” suddenly faced complete uncertainty after an election. New tenders appeared, new providers emerged around the new political circle, and previous investments became worthless. For retailers and POS vendors who had built their systems on top of those monopolistic solutions, the migration cost was huge.
Behind the language of “scaling” and “growth” you can often recognise the same desire: to tie fiscalization to one political structure. It may bring quick success, but it creates systemic risk for everyone who depends on it.
A neutral vendor stays deliberately outside that game. You may work with ministries and tax authorities, but you do not seek exclusive political protection. You build your business on competence and trust, not on election cycles.
Neutrality as a long-term strategy
For a provider of fiscalization consulting and technology, neutrality is not passive. It is an active, strategic choice.
Financial neutrality means building a company that stands on its own legs, with diversified customers and realistic growth. POS neutrality means designing middleware that treats every POS vendor equally and protects the confidentiality of their architectures and data. Political neutrality means collaborating professionally with tax authorities while avoiding dependence on any party or government constellation.
This strategy is slower. It will not produce overnight monopolies or spectacular headlines. But it creates something far more valuable: stability. Over more than twenty years, this approach has allowed us to grow, to expand into more countries, and at the same time to keep the risk for ourselves and for our customers very low.
In a field where a single legal change can close stores or invalidate a system, that stability is worth more than any short-term advantage.
What retailers and POS vendors should look for
If you are a retailer or a POS software vendor selecting a fiscalization partner, you cannot eliminate all risk, but you can understand where the risk sits.
It is worth asking a few simple questions. How independent is this vendor financially? Who are the shareholders and what do they expect? Is the fiscal layer controlled by a competing POS vendor or by an investor who owns several players in the same market? How close is the provider to the government, and what happens if the political landscape changes?
You may still decide to work with them. In some cases, the benefits will justify the risk. But at least you will make that decision consciously, with open eyes.
In my experience, the most robust relationships in this industry are built on neutrality and transparency. When your fiscalization partner is not trying to lock you into a political, financial or technological dependence, you can focus together on the real challenge: keeping retail operations compliant, efficient and ready for the next wave of regulatory change.
In the end, fiscalization is about trust. And trust is easier to build – and to keep – when nobody in the room is secretly hoping to become a monopolist.