Recently, Basware has upped our role in the Business Payments Coalition (BPC) in the United States. With this increased involvement, Basware joins the E-Invoice Exchange Market Pilot which will dedicate it’s time and efforts towards a US e-invoicing framework. Read to learn more about the BPC and about Basware’s role.
The Business Payments Coalition (BPC) is made up of over 600 professional representatives from both small and large businesses, all with different industry backgrounds. They come from a variety of fields such as finance, software, payment processors, service providers, standards developers, and others.
The BPC is focused on increasing the use of electronic communications between buyers and suppliers in procurement, invoicing, and payment processes to grow the value of these relationships. At Basware, we recognise the importance of nurturing these relationships and the pain points that can occur because of improper communication. Today, these important communication areas are managed by many disparate solutions and technologies, creating islands of automation within the supply chain. But the BPC is working to connect these islands to introduce standards and successful interoperability.
The BPC has embarked on a journey to allow any supplier to send an e-invoice to any buyer, regardless of what providers they use. This all-inclusive goal is nothing new to the world of procurement. In fact, the BPC is mirroring the interoperability models of the EU and Australia and working to bring a similar solution to the US marketplace. We understand the important role interoperability plays in streamlining and simplifying the procure-to-pay process. Luckily, the BPC’s interoperability project is well underway, and they’ve already checked off some big steps on their list.
Most recently, The Federal Reserve and the Business Payments Coalition (BPC) announced 67 organisations have joined together to create an operational pilot exchange framework to enable businesses of all kinds to exchange electronic invoices (e-invoices).
The E-invoice Exchange Market Pilot is an initiative created to modernise business-to-business (B2B) payments in the United States. Typically, electronic invoicing and digital payments have gained popularity abroad, but with the growing desire to digitise operations, organisations in the US are expressing a real commitment and desire to modernise their payments. The results speak for themselves as evidenced in other countries. Digitising the payments process decrease costs, improves cash management, mitigates risk, increases transparency across all business operations, gets suppliers paid quicker, and decreases manual error tremendously.
As noted on the BPC’s website, “E-invoice Exchange Market Pilot participants will work to advance the development, testing, implementation, and interim oversight of the U.S. e-invoice exchange framework. The participants have extensive experience or expertise in sending, accepting, or processing corporate invoices, knowledge of e-invoice exchange frameworks, open-source tools, access points and/or registry services. The market pilot will run through year-end 2022 to establish an operational B2B invoice exchange framework for the U.S. market in 2023.”
From the early phase of developing the BPC, Basware was involved in both the technical and semantic design workgroups. As a market leader in AP Automation and e-invoicing capabilities, Basware was excited to play a bigger role in the BPC by participating in the market pilot as both an access point provider on the committees and offer customers an opportunity to partake in the market pilot through Basware.
This gives Basware customers in the US a unique advantage to take part in something that will provide immense benefits to their organisations and help them process more efficiently with businesses locally and globally. The transparency digitisation provides your firm empowers more strategic business decisions, more insight into operations, and structured data of your financial processes.
As noted before, though many countries worldwide have adopted e-invoicing, the US is still a bit behind the marker. But with the introduction of this market pilot, the US will be one step closer to improving their operations and their businesses.