US Federal Reserve looks at XML e-invoicing for increased efficiency

September 20, 2017  |  Electronic Invoicing, North America, Payment

The way e-invoicing is approached, differs around the globe. In Europe, the e-invoicing carousel is lead by a desire to streamline a (financial) supply chain with a strong current focus on standardisation. Latin America on the other is clearly paving the way with a strong focus on compliance and integrated reporting. The Anglo American countries however show a strong focus on payments efficiency as a carrier for e-invoices.

This is confirmed by a recent report from the Federal Reserve, pointed out by Ken Holman here, regarding improving the U.S. payment systems.

And what does the report say about e-invoicing? Well, this:

  • “The Federal Reserve conducted a research effort to assess the potential savings and benefits of e-invoicing for the U.S. market and published the results in July 2016 in the paper, U.S. Adoption of Electronic Invoicing: Challenges and Opportunities. Guided by available literature and industry practitioners, this paper sought to explore the possibility of developing and implementing a standard, ubiquitous B2B electronic invoice and processing platform in the United States similar to those that have been developed in other countries. The paper concludes that the societal benefit in reducing paper invoices is substantial, but the challenges to implementing e-invoicing are just as substantial and a one-size fits all platform may not be effective for the United States. The paper also highlights the strong desire and effort of many business stakeholders to drive adoption of e-invoicing and the value of ongoing industry dialogue to advance efforts.” (p.11)
    .
  • “The Federal Reserve will pursue a new tactic to support greater end-to-end efficiency for business payments, specifically focused on the need to electronify information related to payments in order to increase use of electronic payments: Support industry efforts to develop and promote adoption of standards that enable end-to-end electronic processing of business invoices, payments and remittance information.” (p.12)
    .
  • Support industry efforts to develop and promote adoption of standards that enable end-to-end
    electronic processing of business invoices, payments and remittance information. The Federal Reserve will support industry efforts to develop and promote adoption of standards and to build an interoperability framework for vendors. A major barrier identified by U.S. businesses to adopting electronic payments is the willingness of their trading partner to send or receive automated electronic invoicing information. As part of the Business Payments Coalition, the Federal Reserve will support a three-year initiative to catalog existing e-invoicing standards and design an electronic invoice interoperability framework for the U.S. market. As a complement to this work, the Federal Reserve is helping to coordinate work across leading standards organizations on an open library of standards for electronic XML business documents.

 


Related posts


Comments are closed.