Real Time Economy for EU - Why?

The benefits - direct and indirect -  should be analysed from several angles - even if it is clear that the benefits mostly soon will end up at the EU-citizens table:

1. Benefits for the EU-Citizen

Data driven RTE Ecosystems will:

-       Improve corporate and public sector services by making them data driven and real time

-       Improve management of personal economy

-       Provide line-specific (from e-invoice and POS-receipts) spending follow-up

-       Lower costs and tax burden

-       Improve financing

-       Expand wealth management services

-       Expand availability of goods and services

-       Lower risks

-       Address information overflow issues

-       Lead to real time taxation

2. Benefits for the EU-enterprise

The benefits for enterprises – especially SMEs – are evident:

-       Lower cost of transactions and administrative burden (automated accounting, VAT-reporting, expense reporting, salary administration, governance etc)

-       Real time information on financials and automated forecasts 

-       Better service to customers and suppliers

-       Lower risks (cost of risk mitigation and materializing risks estimated to be 3% of turnover...)

-       Better financing

-       Staff moving from administration to more productive work

-       Digital governance and ownership changes

-       Opportunities for RTE- and other startups

-       Lower tax burden

-       Less grey economy

3. Benefits for the EU public sectors

-       Lower cost levels

-       Better service to citizens in private and employee roles

-       Increased transparency (beneficial ownership)

-       Smaller grey economy > wider tax base

-       Staff freed up from administration to service

-       Tax revenues from better profitability on all enterprises and RTE startups

-       Real Time reporting from salary payments, corporate accounting, property transactions and spending patterns improves forecasting (also in municipalities)

4. Driving the EU Single Market

Digitalization, standardization and free movement of data are the key enablers for the next phases of the Single Market.

-       Standardized ecosystems lower thresholds for pan-EU services and trade

-       Level playfield competition drives development

-       Larger market for IT service providers and startups drive service development and harmonization

-       Transparency saves costs and furthers competition

5. Growth for the EU economy

Digitalization is the single most important factor for competiveness and growth – but also its sustainability aspects are very important as it saves mechanistic work, traveling and material and thus reduces CO2 emissions significantly.

-       Single Market central element for European growth

-       Digital platforms with open interfaces in larger market speed up digitalization and thus productivity.

The direct cost saving impact potential has been evaluated for some of the subprograms. Examples from Finland (bn€/year): e-invoicing: 3.1, e-accounting: 0.2, VAT reporting: 0.4 and e-receipts: 0.8

Multiplication with 70 gives an estimate for EU-level cost savings (for this part a total of 315bn$/year).

The direct cost saving impact from real time payments, automated financing, e-procurement, national income registers, real time taxation, e-address, paperless contracts, block chain, etc are not at hand, but can be estimated to be of similar significance.

The Indirect impact of the above is probably even larger - as seen above.