The Connector Podcast - DFS 2023 - Exploring the Future of E-Invoicing with Ixor

Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen Vanderhoydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.

Welcome to another podcast from the Connector Fintech Belgium at DFS in Brussels. And today I've got with me Roel, working at IXOR. Roel, can you explain a little bit who you are and what your company does?

Yes, thank you. So my name is Roel Verbeek. I founded Ixor 21 years ago already. So it's not a startup, not a scale-up, but a grown-up company.

I like that term, a grown-up.

And at Ixor, we are 50 digitalization and innovation experts. And we work mainly on cloud and AI. We focus on cloud and AI solutions and we do this in projects and in consultancy, but also once in a while we invest in our own products. And we are today with one of our products here at FinTech, which is Xero Docs.

Aha. And could you tell us a little bit more? Because you actually brought some magical ingredients to the talk here, which is AI, cloud, So where does Xort Docs come in when you think about these new technologies?

Yes, well, Xort Docs is smart document processing, and we use AI to recognize in documents, in PDFs, in scanned images, we use AI to recognize the content of the document, like on an invoice, what is the VAT and the number and so on. And we use cloud to do the processing. So based on what we find in the document, we can start process flows and then do solutions like sending documents to Docuval or sending invoices and/or receiving Peppol invoices and so on.

And I was talking to one of your colleagues earlier, but he explained me about there's a lot of like standards that are applying in this world.

Yes.

Could you tell us a bit more about these standards and how that works with your solution?

Yeah, well, the standards I think he was talking about is about invoicing. So there is now—

It was invoicing, yeah.

So there are We do a lot of difficult, different types of documents, but invoicing is something we specialize in a little bit now. And in invoicing, you've learned maybe in the newspapers, and there is the government, the Belgian government, Van Petteghem, who decided that in 2026 now there will be an obligation to use electronic invoices. When you send me an invoice or I send you an invoice, it would have to be digital. And to do this digitalization, there are also standards that apply. And one of these standards is Peppol. And Peppol is as well the structure of where is the number of the invoice, where is the amount of the invoice, but it's also the way of sending the invoice. So, it's like more like a recommandé, and I'm taking the sending. So, when I send an invoice to you using the standard, we know that you received the invoice, that you read it, that it opened, and that maybe you will pay it. So, all these things are standardized little by little throughout Europe.

Oh, that was my next question.

Yes, yes, it's a European standard. So, there are in different countries different pages. In Belgium now, it will be an obligation maybe in 2026. In some countries, there is already an obligation like in Italy. Some countries are a little bit slower. And so, it's really a European standard that is implemented country per country. And maybe surprising too, it's also implemented and followed in Southeast Asia. So, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, these countries are also following the same European standards.

Oh, that's nice. It almost sounds to me that by having these standards, you get more data because you parse the documents and get data, the quality will get better. So I was wondering, does that mean, can we expect some more innovation on the e-invoicing world?

Yes, yes, definitely. Definitely. So now, of course, you have to have the right amount and the right number of an invoice to start with. But in these standards, there will be more than just the data of the invoice. In these standards, There are also standards of receiving and acknowledging the receiving of an invoice. There will be really fine-grained messages that makes it possible to do all kinds of things. So for example, I can see when you open my invoice, when I send an invoice to you.

Mm-hmm.

You can tell me that you've opened it. You can tell me that you are trying to validate it. And you can also tell me through the same type of messages that you will pay it by the end of December, for example. And so that means that when I send you an invoice, I can imagine, or companies can imagine all kinds of fine-grained processes like maybe do factoring because I know that you will give me the money in 15 days and I'm sure because you confirmed it. So there will be a lot of processes that will be possible that are not possible now because now I send you an invoice maybe by mail and I hope you find it. If you don't pay it, I will just send you a reminder. And the first excuse you will give me when you don't pay my invoice, sorry, I didn't see it, I lost it. All these things are gone.

A blast from the past.

A blast from the past, voilà.

And if you look at today the market, would you say that this problem is still existing with the smaller companies or would you also say that some of the bigger companies are also having the same problem of being manual?

It's really everybody, everybody, everybody, every— from the biggest bank to a small coffee shop. They all have the same problems, I think. And they all have the same problems. It's on a different scale, of course, but I think they will all benefit from the same type of new processes that will be possible. And that's definitely also for big banks and that's definitely also for a smaller coffee shop.

Yeah. And by these more refined processes, do you also see a role for AI in there as well?

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. We use already, we use AI to do the recognition and to try to find out what is the process. But there will be also, there will be all kinds of integration possibilities. So there will be a lot of automation that is possible. And in this automation, you will have, yeah, the use of AI is obvious, but Maybe I should explain first, the AI that we are implementing today or until today was really not the AI that you know from GPT and that is popular now, but really specific models to understand, to deeply understand an invoice and all the specifics of an invoice. For example, what is the difference between no VAT and 0% VAT? There is a difference apparently. So our AI is really focused on this kind of things for the moment. And now with GPT, you can— we can combine this with more language possibilities so that you can really go into even more automation. And this goes in 2 directions. When, for example, a customer before implemented X or Y, there's always some work to do from the customer side. the IT department of the customer needs to implement our API and so on. Well, by using these, by combining these different types of AI, we will try to really shorten and reduce the amount of work that the customer IT department should do and just take this away from them and go really into automation, into faster or easier automation, in fact. And that's only one direction. The other direction is that until now, Models can understand 95%, if it's a good model like ours, 95% of the data, of the information is right, and there's still 5% that is wrong. And there is still, if you want to go to 100%, the human in the loop. In a lot of processes, there is still one person verifying it, looking at it, and so on. And we, by combining all this AI technology, we can go to nearly 100%. trying to avoid all this tedious manual validation that is still happening in a lot of customers today.

So we are on the forefront of some completely new innovation in that front.

Yes.

Many people see regulation as a hurdle. I was wondering how you view this in line with what we are discussing today at DFS, how regulation can be an enabler or not.

Yeah.

So, I was wondering, how do you look at it and how does your company deal with this?

Yeah, for us, this regulation around invoicing, for example, is really an opportunity. I think you have to see this from the regulator point of view. They imagined this regulation to create like a level playing field for everybody. So, it means that whenever, I think, When the standards are good standards, and it means that standards that are open and promote interoperability and open source and these kind of things, and that's actually the case with Peppol and e-invoicing. When these standards are good, it's really an opportunity for also smaller companies like ours to create something new and to jump on this train. and to imagine all kinds of new processes on top of these standards. Imagine that there was no standards, then it would be maybe, I don't know, a big company sending to another big company and smaller ones would not have the possibility to invent or innovate something else, I think.

So for you, I would conclude then regulations is a blessing.

Yes, for us it's definitely a blessing. I think for you too.

Yeah, I think honestly I'm a believer of regulation, but that's yet another story. We're coming towards the end of our podcast. Sometimes things go very fast if you're enjoying yourself and talking about nice things. But you're here at DFS today. What have you learned already today?

Well, I've learned that people think about regulation also as an opportunity. A couple of the speakers were going in the same direction. I've also learned, and that's what we experienced too, that also the big tech companies are in favor of this because we also concentrate on e-invoicing, but we couldn't do this without standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say, without using big tech as our cloud provider because we didn't talk about cloud, but we need this cloud provider to do everything we do well. So, I've learned that All these people are also really seeing regulation as an opportunity. And also on top of that, I like the vibe that is happening here. We've met.

Indeed. Twice now.

Twice now. So, that's a good thing. And so, I see also, we were actually, we were invited by customers of ours who said, yeah, you should really come. The company Okeokee, I don't know if you know them, but they said you should come. And I think, yeah, we definitely enjoyed it until now. And it's just 3 o'clock.

It's just the beginning. Great, great, great. I think what you mentioned is it's all about ecosystems, and I would like the audience to invite to become part of your ecosystem. So, Roel, how can they contact you?

Okay, well, I think the easiest way is our website, ixordocs.com. You can also send me an email, roel@ixordocs.com. Dot Verbeek, CK at Xor.be or LinkedIn, Louis Verbeek.

Okay, no cool. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure having you here in the podcast. Thank you also to the audience and stay tuned because more content will come and more insights from DFS today in Brussels. Thank you so much.

Wonderful. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to another episode of the Connected Podcast. To connect and keep up to date with all the latest, head over to www.jointheconnector.com or hit subscribe via your podcast streaming platform.