A UK tech firm whose data exchange platform helps automate billions of pounds’ worth of global trade has won a prestigious vote of confidence from the European Union.

Supply chain specialist Transalis has become one of just 12 solutions providers across Europe to pass a rigorous new electronic invoicing standard.

It puts the Hampshire-headquartered company into the frame for potential contracts with public and private sector organisations doing European business post-Brexit.

The invoicing standard, CEF eInvoicing, is part of the EU’s Connecting Europe Facility programme and is backed by a regulation concerning electronic transactions known as eIDAS, or electronic identification, authentication and trust services.

The project to meet the CEF ‘conformance testing’ was led in-house by Transalis team members Junia Phiong-Humby and Slavek Kizub.

Junia, Solutions and Architecture Manager, said: “The eInvoicing initiative is all about championing the benefits of digital invoices, something that has been a major focus at Transalis for more than 15 years.

“Digital invoicing reduces the costs of processing, print, postage, storage and archiving, and means there are fewer data entry errors.

“By showing we now conform to the CEF eInvoicing standard, we’re giving customers greater confidence that we can cut their administrative burden while helping to facilitate cost-effective and secure cross-border trade and co-operation.”

Slavek, Systems Manager, said: “Achieving this coveted standard strengthens our credentials as a trusted partner for e-invoicing solutions.

“Our scaleable, cloud-based EDI platform helps all kinds of companies and organisations manage their trading networks.

“This latest EU vote of confidence in us means we can play an even stronger role in supporting the effectiveness of online services and electronic commerce across Europe.”

With the standard now confirmed, the next step for Transalis is to conduct a series of stringent interoperability tests with partner organisations so that their systems are also validated and compliant.

Transalis’ cloud-based supply chain solutions help facilitate the exchange of around 40 million virtual documents a year, underpinning more than £4 billion of commercial trade in a myriad of business sectors across 32 countries.