On Dec. 5, industry experts joined the Business Payments Coalition’s (BPC) webinar (Off-site) which outlines the concept of an e-Invoice interoperability framework, market challenges and benefits of addressing them and a path forward for the BPC work assessing U.S. market needs.
Watch the webinar to learn more about how an interoperability framework
- Addresses the key barriers of cost effective adoption of e-Invoicing through an open, federated network of access points
- Facilitates mass connectivity, where businesses can connect once, and seamlessly exchange invoices with anyone
- Establishes the necessary first step to achieving straight-through processing for business-to-business (B2B) payment transactions
- Increases the adoption of electronic payments by automating related processes such as invoicing
“As demonstrated in Europe and elsewhere, the existing e-Invoice frameworks are positioned well to enable widespread e-Invoice adoption. The U.S. has an opportunity to achieve similar results by leveraging the learnings, standards, policies and guidelines developed by those frameworks and customizing them for this market,” noted Todd Albers, Senior Payments Consultant, who is coordinating the BPC on their multi-year initiative with industry stakeholders to outline recommendations for an e-Invoice interoperability framework for the U.S. market.
Path Forward
By leveraging the learnings and implementation strategies from frameworks that exist in other countries, the U.S. can create an interoperable ecosystem of access points, enabling service providers and accounting technology systems to provide sellers and buyers a service to connect once, and seamlessly exchange electronic invoices with anyone across the open, federated network.
The BPC will continue to coordinate the e-Invoice interoperability framework initiative with industry stakeholders. Their next steps include:
- Continuing the assessment work by creating specifications for the U.S. semantic model. This work will be valuable beyond supporting the Interoperability framework.
- Continuing the assessment work by conducting a validation exercise of a registration model most likely suitable for the United States and document considerations for adoption in the United States.
- Conducting an assessment of existing governance models and organizations and provide recommendations for governance in the United States.
Get involved
Join the BPC: The BPC is an internationally recognized organization with over 650 volunteer members working together to promote greater adoption of electronic B2B invoices, payments, and remittance data. Its goal is to make B2B electronic payments more efficient across the end-to-end process. Visit the BusinessPaymentsCoalition.org (Off-site) website to learn more. Be a part of the change by joining the BPC (Off-site)!
Learn more
Read the Overview of an e-Invoice Interoperability Framework Report (Off-site, PDF) for more information, and stay tuned for an upcoming webinar expected to take place in January 2020. The next webinar will highlight the BPC’s technical reports: e-Invoice Interoperability Framework: e-Delivery Network Feasibility Assessment Report (Off-site, PDF) and e-Invoice Interoperability Framework: e-Invoice Semantic Model Assessment, which is planned to be published by year end.