Industry Insights

The tax-free ecosystem runs on compliance — yet trust, its most essential component, has long been treated as implicit. Operators exchange data without shared visibility, retailers rely on processes they cannot verify, and customs authorities work from delayed or incomplete information.

To rebuild confidence, trust must be designed into the system itself: transparent, auditable, and verifiable in real time. Only then can compliance become an enabler of progress, not a constraint on it.

For decades, the VAT refund industry has relied on a closed model: a few dominant operators controlling the entire flow, from form issuance to final payout. It was a system built around ownership — of data, of interfaces, of merchants’ and travelers’ journeys.

This structure made sense in a paper-based world. Complexity was manageable when refund slips were stamped at airports and reconciled manually. But as cross-border retail became digital, the model showed its limits. What once ensured efficiency now creates friction: retailers are disconnected from their own refund experience, travelers face inconsistent processes, and customs authorities lack the transparency they need to operate with confidence.

Tax-free shopping was designed to reward travelers — yet too often it leaves them with queues, opaque fees, and a break in the brand experience. A shopper who spends at a store should complete their journey with that store, not be handed off to a disconnected service. The industry deserves open, transparent, and traveler-first solutions that restore continuity, fairness, and trust. It’s time to rethink what tax-free can be.