The history of Peppol: from EU pilot to global e-invoicing network

Peppol started in 2008 as a European Commission pilot for cross-border public procurement. Today it is an international framework for exchanging e-invoices, orders and other business documents, used by public bodies and businesses in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. This article follows how it got there: the original project, the handover to OpenPeppol, the technical changes that turned it into a general business network, and the national mandates now built on it.

For how the network works today, see What is Peppol?

In the mid-2000s, electronic public procurement in Europe was fragmented. Member states had their own e-tendering platforms, electronic signature schemes and invoice formats, so a supplier in one country could rarely bid for or invoice a public contract in another without adapting to local systems. The European Commission funded PEPPOL (Pan-European Public Procurement Online) to show that cross-border e-procurement could work on shared, open specifications.

A paper presented at the Wirtschaftsinformatik conference in 2009 described the core challenge as interoperability on three levels: organizational (common processes and a pragmatic handling of legal differences), semantic (standardized business documents) and technical (standardized transport and electronic signatures). The authors argued that a Europe-wide solution had to be based on open standards and build on existing national infrastructure (Sonntagbauer and Bodiroza, 2009).

PEPPOL started on 1 May 2008 as a large-scale pilot under the EU’s Competitiveness and Innovation Programme (CIP ICT Policy Support Programme). It was coordinated by the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment (Difi), and its €30.8 million budget was funded jointly by the European Commission and the consortium members. The consortium grew during the project and ended up with 18 partners from 11 or 12 European countries, depending on the source.

The project covered the procurement chain both before and after the contract award:

Some of the hardest problems were legal and organizational rather than technical. Electronic signatures are a good example. Many member states required qualified or advanced signatures in e-tendering, so a bid signed in one country had to be verifiable in another. PEPPOL addressed this with signature validation services instead of a single signature scheme, an approach described in a 2012 paper on the project’s four years of eSignature work (Ølnes, 2012). After an extension, the project formally ended on 31 August 2012.

To keep the specifications and the network running after the EU funding ended, the results were handed over to a new organization. OpenPeppol AISBL, an international non-profit association under Belgian law, has been operational since 1 September 2012 as the member-driven organization that maintains and governs the Peppol specifications, agreements and governance framework.

OpenPeppol started with 5 members from 5 countries. By October 2019 it had 375 members in 34 countries. In July 2025 it reported members in 44 countries, Peppol Authorities in 23 countries and Peppol business documents exchanged in 65 countries.

The name changed character along the way. PEPPOL began as an acronym for the pilot. OpenPeppol now describes Peppol simply as the name of its interoperability framework, and the network is used for trade between businesses as well as for public procurement.

OpenPeppol is member-driven. Key elements of its governance structure include:

Each participating country has a Peppol Authority, a government body that signs agreements with the service providers in its country and can add national requirements. In Sweden, the role is held by the National Agency for Public Procurement (Upphandlingsmyndigheten).

Three changes between 2014 and 2023 turned Peppol from a procurement pilot into infrastructure that businesses use for everyday trade.

Directive 2014/55/EU required public authorities in the EU to be able to receive and process electronic invoices that comply with a European standard, which CEN published as EN 16931 in 2017. Central government bodies had to be able to do so by 18 April 2019, and sub-central contracting authorities by 18 April 2020 at the latest. EN 16931 defines the semantic data model of an invoice. Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 is a Core Invoice Usage Specification (CIUS) of the standard that makes the model implementable on the Peppol network, so a valid Peppol invoice also follows EN 16931. It became available on 27 February 2018 and mandatory on the network on 18 April 2019, and it is maintained through regular releases. See the current Peppol BIS Billing documentation for the applicable version.

The pilot’s first transport protocol, START, was replaced by AS2 in the years after the project, and later by AS4, the same messaging standard used by the EU’s eDelivery building block. AS4 became mandatory between Peppol Access Points on 1 February 2020, according to OpenPeppol’s migration plan. The change shows how Peppol keeps the business document specifications separate from the messaging layer that transports them.

As countries outside Europe joined, Peppol needed a way to support local rules on a common core. Peppol International (PINT) provides a common international core for invoice specifications, with jurisdiction-specific profiles where local tax and regulatory requirements differ, such as PINT SG for Singapore, PINT JP for Japan and PINT AE for the UAE. The International Observatory on eInvoicing at Politecnico di Milano dates the launch of the PINT standard to July 2023.

The first Peppol Authorities outside Europe were set up in Asia-Pacific:

Network size has grown with the mandates. In April 2024, before Belgium’s B2B mandate took effect, OpenPeppol reported 1,016,364 registered receivers in the network. The figure counts registered receiving participants, not unique companies.

Many traditional EDI arrangements connected trading partners through bilateral agreements and partner-specific configurations. Each new partner needed its own setup, so costs grew with every connection.

Operators (VANs) then acted as intermediaries. This works when both parties use the same operator, but across operators it requires roaming agreements, and international trading partners rarely share one.

Peppol uses a four-corner model: the sender, the sender’s Access Point, the receiver’s Access Point and the receiver. The sending Access Point uses SML and SMP lookups to find the receiver’s Access Point and the document types the receiver accepts, so the two parties need neither a shared provider nor a bilateral connection.

Some countries add a fifth corner: the tax authority. In this decentralized model, known as DCTCE (Decentralized Continuous Transaction Control and Exchange), the service providers report tax data to the authority while the invoice still moves between the businesses’ Access Points, so the authority does not stop or approve each invoice. In the UAE, Ministerial Decision No. 244 of 2025 set a pilot and voluntary phase from 1 July 2026 and requires large businesses to implement by 1 January 2027. Slovakia starts mandatory domestic B2B e-invoicing with five-corner reporting on 1 January 2027, with intra-EU transactions planned to follow from 1 July 2030.

Peppol itself is not a legal requirement, but a growing number of national mandates rely on it. Belgium has required structured e-invoices for nearly all domestic transactions between VAT-liable businesses since 1 January 2026, with Peppol as the default channel. From 1 January 2027, Norwegian businesses with bookkeeping obligations must issue electronic invoices to other bookkeeping-obliged businesses that are registered to receive them, and from 1 January 2030 all of them must be able to receive e-invoices. EHF and Peppol BIS Billing are approved formats, and a PDF does not meet the requirement when the buyer can receive e-invoices. E-invoicing requirements by country.

Qvalia is a certified Peppol Access Point and SMP provider. We connect businesses and software platforms to the network, register Peppol IDs and handle delivery. Read how we work as your Peppol Service Provider or the Peppol documentation and implementation guide.