On September 14, SME Banking Club, together with Intellias, organized a webinar on e-invoicing in the digital bank for SMEs.
At the very beginning of the webinar, Olena Gryniuk (SME Banking Club) mentioned that the usage of electronic invoices will become mandatory for businesses operating in the European Union in the upcoming 2-3 years. It means that businesses will have to choose their e-invoice provider. Whether banks will be providers of these services for SMEs in the CEE region and what solutions will they implement? All these questions were the main topic of the webinar. In addition, Olena Gryniuk noted that 30% of the banks in the CEE region implemented e-invoicing for their SME customers as of now.
After that, Ivan Bakhtin (Intellias) presented information related to the international standards of e-invoicing and highlighted that some EDI providers readily integrate with others. As a result, such interaction affects both international companies and domestic ones (with international suppliers and/or customers). So, they can be connected between ERP or accounting systems and EDI providers. Moreover, Ivan demonstrated typical procurement and EDI interaction models (three corner models).
Then Ivan Bakhtin introduced the examples of market accounting and e-invoicing solutions, as well as market payment processing solutions for the SME sector.
After that, Ivan proposed to figure out which solution will be better for the banks – to develop e-invoice products in-house or to integrate with SaaS. These two approaches, of course, have their advantages and disadvantages, and banks should consider using one or another depending on their digital strategy. E.g., if banks will develop e-invoice products in-house, they can control the process management, and easily integrate the internal systems. On the contrary, it requires more funds and a longer time-to-market time. If banks will integrate e-invoicing solutions with SaaS, the implementation can be done quickly, there will be no need for competition and significant funding.
Furthermore, in the last part of the webinar Katalin Kauzli (Charlie-India) joined Olena Gryniuk and Ivan Bakhtin in the Panel Discussion. The main question that Olena Gryniuk discussed with the speaker was “What stops the banks from implementing e-invoicing as advantages for both banks and SMEs (if to name shortly: new revenue streams from the e-invoicing service itself, and also increased revenues from core banking operations: transactions and finance; personalization of the offer and contextual finance) are obvious”.
Katalin Kauzli sees two main reasons for that:
- Banks’ mindset – as they haven’t implemented e-invoicing before, as this is not a core banking product, they don’t have people devoted to that and that stops them on the high level. Partners can help in consulting on product implementation as a part of the integration process.
- The stage of the digital journey bank is located at. The more digital processes banks implemented for their customers the more open they are to the next implementations. But initially, there is no direct correlation between the availability of end-to-end digital journey for the business customer in the bank and the implementation of the e-invoicing journey. These journeys could be built simultaneously or in parallel, or separately – depending on the bank’s digital strategy.
Therefore, all speakers once again conclude that the implementation of e-invoicing solutions by banks is a key decision that is required and beneficial to both sides.
To learn more details, watch the full webinar below:
