Both associations, together with their respective membership communities, will benefit from closer and deeper levels of cooperation, as they create a new joint force to provide expertise for both public and private sector in developing and accelerating the adoption of e-invoicing. The European E-invoicing Service Providers Association (EESPA) community includes Europes leading service providers that provide e-invoicing and supply chain automation solutions to businesses of all sizes, as well as consumers.
OpenPEPPOL brings together a large community of public procurement authorities and many service and solution providers that support the deployment of the PEPPOL specifications in creating a Pan-European network infrastructure to support e-procurement and e-invoicing.
According to EESPA, “e-invoicing is easy, quick, secure and environmentally responsible. E-invoicing helps speed up cash flow, which helps smooth out complications and problems in the economy. Innovative industries, businesses and governments are driving the sea-change, and every initiative to implement e-invoicing needs be supported and encouraged.
The MOU identifies a number of areas where the two associations will cooperate including: Developing common positions on EU public policy support for e-invoicing through the Digital Single Market agenda to ensure that regulation and standards meet market needs and encourage easy and rapid switch to e-invoicing by all stakeholders.
Working together to ensure that the PEPPOL specifications are further developed to even higher levels of functionality and that respective EESPA and PEPPOL frameworks enable high levels of interoperability and end-user satisfaction.
Participating with mutually agreed objectives in standards initiatives relevant to supply chain automation, including the current project to create a European Core Invoice Model, being pursued by CEN Technical Committee 434.Researching ways in which the two communities could deploy their joint capabilities to serve the broader B2B marketplace.
The MOU was signed at the EESPA General Assembly Meeting in May 2016 in Tallinn, Estonia.
