Author Anna Bjärkerud shares her reflections from a recent webinar around International trade and compliance held together by EBG Network and Basware.
Companies with global operations must comply with new and changing trade agreements and regulations. This ensures ethical practices in international trade around the world. In most of Europe, trade is governed by the EU standard, which defines policies based on EU’s founding principle of free trade among its members.
In our recent webinar we discussed the changing landscape of international trade and compliance. We especially focused on transaction rules and regulations on a global scale, drawing from experiences from Gustav Gnosspelius, Senior Network and Technical Presales consultant and Kent Westerlund, Senior Presales consultant at Basware.
We also got first hand information about Peppol and its progress from André Hoddevik, Secretary General OpenPeppol AISBL, Head of eProcurement Unit, Public Procurement Department at the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency.
During the webinar we asked the audience to provide their experiences. First question we asked was: Have companies had any bigger changes to their international trade set up?
This question can mean several things. It can mean what it looks like – that many have had Covid-19 related changes to their international trade set up. It can also mean that the even higher number saying they haven’t had any changes – comes from a situation where that group of companies to a large extent don’t have too much international trade. It can of course also mean what it says – that they do but just haven’t had any changes.
Our next question for the webinar audience was: Do you keep track of supplier risk and performance?
This is a topic most will remember as THE topic of 2020. Companies have faced supply chains – both physical and financial – being broken due to the global crisis (cannot bare to write the C-word). It has become evident how insightful businesses have really been.
Doing a risk assessment in the beginning of a relationship is usually the norm. Checking financial strength probably the most common. The crisis has shown us how reliant supply chains are on the entire network of suppliers. For sure those networks have traditionally not been penetrated with any luck. This will for sure change! The technology is here.
It is clear that even though cross border trade has been made easier due to collaborations such as Peppol, there are still many regulations to consider on a country by country basis. Not the least from the perspective how governments want to control domestic and international trade – especially what tax is being exchanged.
New regulations and country specific standards to keep an eye out for
How to use business networks for international trade
How to automate trade compliance for your business that include different formats, processes and archiving standards
How to ensure that collaboration with your supplier is compliant /How to improve vendor management