Independence & conflict-of-interest policy.
The commercial structure that lets a TRACIO recommendation be honest. No hardware sales. No referral commissions. No resale margin. No platform of our own. Cite this page in any RFP, security questionnaire or procurement review.
The four hard rules.
These are the structural commitments behind every TRACIO engagement, applied without exception across the consulting, build-integration, programme-rescue and managed-services lines. They are designed to be auditable by your procurement, legal and security teams.
1 · We do not sell hardware.
TRACIO does not resell tags, anchors, readers, sensors, gateways or any associated infrastructure. No part of our revenue depends on the volume or brand of hardware specified in a project. Procurement of hardware is yours, direct from the chosen vendor, on your terms.
2 · We do not take referral commissions.
We accept no commission, kickback, rebate, finder's fee, marketing development funding, channel-partner bonus or any other monetary or in-kind compensation from any RTLS, RFID, IoT, software or systems-integration vendor we recommend or evaluate.
If we ever propose changing this, it will be disclosed in writing before the engagement starts.
3 · We do not have a software platform.
TRACIO does not own, license, distribute, sublicense or sell a location-intelligence, RTLS, fleet-orchestration, digital-twin or IoT software platform.
Our recommendations therefore never have to defend a product P&L. Visualisers and interactive examples on this site are educational content, not products.
4 · We do not earn delivery margin on resale.
Where TRACIO delivers integration or programme management, fees are billed transparently against the model on our How we work & fees page. Hardware and software pass through at supplier cost — we do not mark up third-party goods.
Disclosures we make proactively.
Even with the four rules above, certain situations create the appearance of conflict. We disclose them, in writing, before they affect a recommendation:
- Vendor familiarity. Our founder and senior consultants have, at points in their careers, worked inside major RFID and RTLS localisation vendors. We name the vendors and the years on individual profile pages. Where prior employment creates familiarity that could bias an evaluation, we flag it explicitly in the discovery report.
- Concurrent engagements. If we are advising another client in the same vertical at the same time, we disclose the fact (without breaking confidentiality on either side) and offer the option to engage a different consultant on our team.
- Subcontracted delivery. Where specialist engineers, integrators or domain experts are brought in to deliver, they sign the same independence and confidentiality terms we operate under. They earn no commissions either.
- Speaking and analyst relationships. Conferences, podcasts and analyst briefings sometimes involve sponsorship from vendors. We accept invitations on editorial terms only; we do not accept payment to recommend a vendor or product.
How this policy is auditable.
The independence policy is designed to be testable, not just stated. Procurement, internal audit or your CISO can verify it through any of the following means, on request and under appropriate NDA:
Revenue breakdown
A written attestation, signed at director level, of TRACIO's revenue composition: advisory, delivery, training. Zero from hardware or referral.
Vendor agreements
List, on request, of any commercial agreements with named vendors. The only categories are confidentiality NDAs, beta-tester agreements (data only, no payment) and analyst-style access. Never reseller or partner-tier agreements.
Client references
References from clients we have explicitly recommended against a particular vendor — the strongest single proof that we are willing to say no when the evidence requires it.
What this means commercially for you.
Three practical consequences flow from the policy, and they show up in every engagement:
Vendor shortlists are defensible. Because we earn nothing from the choice, the shortlist we produce can be audited by procurement and accepted by the board without an asterisk. Many clients re-use our evaluation framework on subsequent procurements.
Pilots are designed to surface problems. A vendor-led pilot is structured to win the deal. An independent pilot is structured to expose the edge cases before the spend scales. The economic incentive points in opposite directions, and the deliverables look different as a result.
Programme exits are clean. Every stage of the TRACIO Programme Method ends with a written gate criterion you can act on. If the gate fails, you exit without the sunk-cost pressure a single-vendor delivery would create.
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