The next step to RTE is as we know e-invoicing. Here we have seen any number of great news - together they mean massive progress.
In Finland: - over 70 000 enterprises signed up in Nordea, over 40 000 in OP-bank, great campaign in consumer invoicing by invoice senders,public sector, banks and TietoEnator, Kesko declaring e-invoicing mandatory, several more on the way, state sector aiming for 100% by end 2009, extremely good growth in usage
In EU: - expert group and EU driving equal treatment of paper and e-invoicing, most countries support it, standardization making good progress with Cross Industry Invoice, midterm report soon out - aiming at 2012 as year when many countries have already made e-invoicing default option Holland launches all-out e-invoicing initiative - e-invoice operators and banks together, Spain progressing very fast - thanks to public sector,
Altogether: Awareness arriving at: Paper invoices have NO Future. A goal in itself for megareasons like:
1. saving over 200 billions in handling b2b + many more
2. potential to reduce CO2 by 2.800.000 tons
and then
3. learning - just in time - by doing e-invoicing - doing other digital transactions
4. saving more from next layers of documents
5, better jobs - productive, more challenging, better paid - must - as working age population will shrink dramatically
6. RTE