During the European E-Invoicing Exchange Summit in Berlin on 2 October, Mathieu Pasture, Product Owner at Dokapi, will moderate a round table on this subject.
For nearly 50 years, EDI has been the backbone of B2B document exchange and it has already reinvented itself several times along the way. Now it's facing what may be its biggest transformation yet. Peppol, long seen as a niche e-invoicing channel, is quietly repositioning itself as the interoperability layer for procurement, logistics, and finance across Europe. Here's a preview of the questions we'll be putting on the table.
Peppol reduces the need for bilateral connections, proprietary formats, and costly partner onboarding. As standardised connectivity becomes widely available, traditional EDI models will need to evolve from managing individual point-to-point connections towards providing scalable interoperability services.
As Peppol expands into orders, catalogues, despatch advice, status messages, and other supply-chain processes, it can no longer be treated simply as an accounting or invoicing capability. Organisations should increasingly view Peppol as shared integration infrastructure serving finance, procurement, logistics, supply chain, and other business functions not a line item owned by the finance team alone.
E-invoicing may be the main driver of adoption today, but Peppol is fundamentally a generic interoperability framework. Its potential extends across the supply chain, from procurement and ordering through logistics and invoicing. Designing Peppol architectures around invoices alone risks creating limitations when organisations later expand into these broader processes.
Peppol should be seen as part of a wider digitalisation strategy rather than an isolated solution. It can complement existing EDI by providing standardised connectivity where bilateral integration is unnecessary, while technologies such as OCR continue to digitise documents from partners that are not yet structured or connected. The interesting question isn't which technology wins, it's how organisations combine Peppol, EDI, OCR, and APIs into one coherent digital strategy rather than treating them as competing options.
Peppol standardises how participants discover each other, exchange documents, and validate agreed formats but it does not standardise every internal business process. That raises an important question: where should the responsibilities of the Peppol network, the Service Provider, the ERP vendor, and the end-user organisation begin and end?
Rather than every ERP or accounting vendor building and maintaining its own Peppol connectivity, Access Point capabilities are increasingly being consumed as shared infrastructure. This lets software vendors focus on business functionality while specialised providers manage connectivity, compliance, routing, and network evolution.
Peppol implementations sometimes reproduce the complexity of traditional EDI: custom mappings, routing rules, bilateral onboarding all over again. The real opportunity is to rethink this model entirely: standardise wherever possible, make onboarding almost frictionless, and focus Service Provider value on validation, observability, APIs, lifecycle management, and business-level semantics.
Join the conversation. These are exactly the questions we'll be exploring at the European E-Invoicing Exchange Summit in Berlin on the 2nd of October, where Mathieu Pasture will be moderating a round table on this topic. If you'll be there, come find us. We'd love to continue the discussion in person.
