EBRF 2007

Useful and interesting material. My own presentation focused on the practical steps to get to a real time economy (real time invoicing, real time payments, real time accounting etc) - will be added later.

100 billion reasons

When looking for opportunities to improve productivity and improve service digitalization is the key. Large enterprises have already achieved quite a lot - albeit with expensive, inflexible and proprietory EDI solutions - but small enterprises and the public sector are still largely un-automated.

Digitalization progress can be made in layers - and the next one is payments-integrated e-invoicing - ie the tool for even the smallest enterprise to send and receive e-invoices in their netbanks - just like payments. They do not need to invest or install anything and the XML-format produced coupled with the ECBS standard for payment initiation (ePI) makes automation easy. This has already been introduced with great success in Finland.

EU has estimated that the savings in processing can reach 100bn€ per year. A recent estimate from the European Association for Corporate Treasurers arrived at well over 200bn€.. No reason for sitting on hands if we want to improve productivity in Europe.