Commercial documents exchange: a european challenge

Important volumes challenges

The situation :

• More than 200 billions of commercial documents in Europe every year
• Less than 7% of invoices are sent electronically
• This area is identified by the European Commission as the next step after SEPA with savings estimated to 100 billions euros
• The subject is at the heart of companies concerns (refer to the ABE offical web site (Association Bancaire pour l'Euro - Banking Association for Euro): https://www.abe-eba.eu, and to the report of the eInvoicing group expertsreport)

Characteristics of commercial documents exchanges

Almost all the current exchanges are performed using:

• Simple letters
• Registered letters with or without acknowledgement of receipt
• Emails
• Faxes

This involves the folowing drawbacks:

• no routing guarantee (the responsibility of the sender which manages any return)
• no formal confidentiality (useless in most of cases)
• no strict authentication of the sender and of the receiver (usually without concern as most of exchanges are domestic)
• a complex management of receivers addresses (postal or email addresses)
• a manual matching of commercial documents with payments
• millions of participants and an increasing number of relationships (Europeanization and globalization of the economy)

References