Regulatory updates - United States

The meeting resulted in significant progress toward enhancing e-invoicing interoperability between the two regions. The joint statement included a declaration outlining key objectives for this endeavor.

What does this new development entail?

The United States and the European Union have both embraced essential principles for successful e-invoicing, which include:

• Connect once, connect with everyone;
• No roaming fees between Access Points*;
• Open exchanges where users are free to choose their AP.

Additionally, the plan is to discuss further the alignment between the US and EU e-invoicing specifications and standards to foster interoperability better considering the following three pillars:

• Flexibility of the data structure - Certain parts of the invoice data structure should be standardized, while there should be room for adjustment to accommodate varying business information and legal requirements.
• Payload alignment - The data exchanged in e-invoices should be business and technically compatible.
• Roaming establishment - Establishing roaming capabilities among service providers will ensure easy connectivity and interoperability among businesses in the US and EU markets.

What are the next steps?

Industry leaders and experts will be identified and invited for a meeting on 2 May 2024 to drive forward the pursuit of an enhanced e-invoicing interoperability initiative.

*An Access Point is a gateway linking the community of end-users (buyers and sellers) and their service providers with various e-invoicing/e-procurement solutions.

The BPC is a group of over 600 organizations in the U.S., working together to promote greater adoption of electronic payments, remittance data, and invoices in the business sector. The coalition has commenced an E-invoice Exchange Market Pilot for businesses of all types to exchange e-invoices.

The electronic exchange framework will establish standards and guidelines to connect once and exchange documents with anyone else on the network. As the world goes more digital, U.S. organizations need to keep pace with the developments in e-invoicing.

Learn how the BPC pilot helps companies in the USA future-proof their electronic invoicing processes on our blog.

Who is driving the initiative

The steps towards an e-invoicing model are being made by The Business Payments Coalition (BPC) steered by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. This is a volunteer group of organizations and individuals working together to promote the adoption and standardization of electronic B2B payments, remittance data and invoices. Their goal is to make B2B electronic payments more efficient across the end-to-end process, both for the purchase-to-pay and order-to-cash cycles.

The real amount of e-invoices in the US

According to the BPC, there is 25% of invoices sent electronically in the US market. However, few of them can be considered actual e-invoices.

For example, many in the market today claim that an e-mail is an electronic invoice too, whereas the invoice attached does not contain any structured data, and the buyer has to manually download and/or print the invoice information for further processing. Similar limitations exist when an invoice is made available in an unstructured data or PDF format by a service provider.

Proof of concept and further steps

Recently, BPC announced the completion of a proof of concept (POC) of a federated registry services model for the US e-invoice exchange framework. The goal of the POC was to test the concept of a federated registry service model in a four-corner network. The model has been proven to provide technical interoperability and allow service providers in the four-corner model to create the necessary connections for secure message delivery between each other.

This e-invoice exchange framework will pave the way for an in-market pilot in late 2022 and early 2023, making it an important step towards e-invoicing on a country-wide level in the USA.