In the past decade, the European Union has sponsored a number of initiatives to drive eInvoicing adoption. In an ideal world, all companies are eInvoicing capable. They all communicate using the same technologies and interact seamlessly to optimize their supply chain. As of now though, eInvoicing capabilities remain a differentiator and give companies a competitive edge. A key actor in this domain are access points and intermediaries such as Babelway.
As with all technology matters, protocols and message formats evolve and improve. Key concerns in the 80s are not the same as now. Business flexibility has replaced concerns for message volume. Security comes far before concise message content. Real time messaging is now more important than reducing message volume (companies used to aggregate messages to limit the number of messages). Legal matters have also forced message content to evolve. For this reason, although the business of paper invoicing has hardly changed in the past century, the e-Invoicing world is constantly adopting improved standards and protocols.
In order to boost technology adoption and to enable an overall upgrade of B2B interactions in the EU, the commission has sponsored the POOL-TSP project. The commission selected a group of ten trusted service providers across Europe: Belgium, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Italy. These service providers have upgraded their solutions in order to breach the gap between the old and the new and offer safer, more robust messaging platforms to their clients.
As the Belgian service provider we have used this opportunity to greatly significantly upgrade our platform. Key improvements include:
- A more scalable solution to support enhanced monitoring message records
- Support for AS4 both standalone and with Peppol
- Rejection of duplicate messages
- Enhanced support and validation for over 70 UBL profiles and customizations
- Support and validation for CII invoices
This journey will end at the end of June as we finalize the testing rounds which will guarantee that we are all capable to interconnect using these new protocols and formats. In particular, it will allow all 10 providers to comply with the 2014/55/EU directive.
