Insights from the « Mastering Complexity: European Sovereignty, Digital Trust, and the Future of Financial Resilience » roundtable organised by Banqup Group at VivaTech 2026.

2027 will be a turning point for companies across Europe, large and small. The European Union is reshaping financial regulation around invoicing: electronic invoicing will become mandatory across Member States, fundamentally changing how businesses exchange data, manage cash flow, and report to tax authorities. 

At VivaTech 2026, Banqup convened a roundtable of senior voices from ECMA, Austrian Post International Deutschland GmbH, Google Cloud, Visa, and SIXT to explore what this transition really means for European businesses. The conversation surfaced five strategic shifts that will define the next two years of European B2B finance. 

Shift 1: From compliance burden to operational modernisation 

For Damien Charrier, President of ECMA (French National Council of Chartered Accountants), the most important shift in the way companies should think about e-invoicing is the framing itself. Treating it as a compliance project alone misses the point. E-invoicing will affect IT, sales, procurement, finance, management, changing the whole operational rhythm of the company.

What it really brings is an opportunity for modernisation: better cash management, reduced payment delays, automated workflows, and a new era of data analysis. With 26 million SMEs across Europe directly concerned, this also becomes one of the most effective levers against invoicing fraud at scale.

The structural challenge, however, lies beyond the company level. Member States are moving at different paces, with different technical standards. Whether Europe builds shared infrastructure or fragments into incompatible national systems  will determine the success of the entire transition. 

Shift 2: From national mandates to cross-border inevitability 

George Wallner, Executive Vice President of Austrian Post, made one of the most concrete observations of the day: a typical European company processes around 2,000 documents per day. The volume alone tells you why structured digital data is not a question of if, but when.

Austria has not yet introduced an e-invoicing mandate, but Austrian Post believes the shift will happen regardless. The reason is simple: European trade is too interconnected to stop at national borders. As soon as Germany makes e-invoicing mandatory in January, Austrian companies trading with German partners will have no choice but to align. Through its partnership with Banqup, Austrian Post is already preparing to deliver structured data instead of letters to its corporate clients, extending its century-long mission of trusted document delivery into the digital era.

Shift 3: From cloud infrastructure to digital sovereignty 

For Florent Jeannot from Google Cloud, the central theme is digital trust and the way CFOs increasingly see it as a non-negotiable prerequisite, not an IT detail. In a regulatory environment where European companies must control where their data sits and who can access it, trust is built through architecture: encryption, access controls, legal partnerships with local providers, and the ability for companies to choose their own data boundaries.

The point is not that companies must pick between regulation and security, between innovation and sovereignty. It is that modern cloud architecture should make those trade-offs disappear entirely.

Shift 4: From card networks to interoperable payment rails 

Audrey Chabin, Head Of Business Development France & Benelux at Visa, brought one of the most quoted lines of the session, and one that captures the broader European philosophy on digital infrastructure: « We build sovereignty around collaboration, not isolation. » The point is that European digital independence is not achieved by walling off the continent, but by building strong, interoperable partnerships between global infrastructure providers and local actors.

The numbers behind this commitment are significant: at a global scale, Visa processes $16 trillion in transactions per year and invests $12 billion in cybersecurity, with an additional €500 million committed to European infrastructure, notably a future data centre within the eurozone. Yet the speaker underlined that the real challenge does not lie with large corporates, but with SMEs.

Today, one in three payments in Europe are not paid on time. Small companies often lack the resources to interpret the new regulations, let alone implement them. This is where Visa’s role becomes practical, providing what the speaker called « the rails »: account-to-account cross-border payment solutions, which let businesses transfer money directly between bank accounts across European borders without going through traditional card networks. These solutions need to be connected, secure, and interoperable. And critically, SMEs should not have to navigate this complexity alone – they should be able to delegate it to partners like Banqup.

Looking ahead, AI is the next major enabler. It can connect every step of the financial workflow, from invoice generation to reconciliation, making the entire process faster and more resilient. New payment methods, including stablecoins, are also part of this evolving landscape.

« Future resilience will be built with smart financial workflows. »

— Audrey Chabin, Visa 

Shift 5: From downstream tax checks to embedded validation

A question from the audience pointed to what may become the most complex layer of the e-invoicing shift: tax. As multiple platforms emerge to handle digital invoicing, the question of how taxes are validated, shared, and protected becomes critical.

Tax validation will need to happen at the platform level itself, not as a separate downstream check. Major accounting platforms are already asking how this will be organised technically, and how they can build the infrastructure to maintain control over tax compliance at the moment of invoicing rather than afterwards.

This question remains unresolved. It will likely become the defining technical challenge of the next two years, and the area where platforms either earn or lose the trust of regulators and enterprises alike.

Conclusion

E-invoicing began as a tax instrument. What the roundtable revealed is that it has become something larger: the connective tissue of a more integrated European financial market. Cash management, cybersecurity, AI, payments, and taxation – each thread discussed at the session points to the same underlying shift. Europe is, quietly and steadily, building the digital infrastructure of an integrated financial economy.

For companies, the question of 2027 will not be whether they meet a regulatory deadline. It will be whether they have built the tools, partnerships, and architecture to turn this regulatory wave into a sustainable competitive advantage.