Digitalisation and credit markets: Evidence from eInvoicing

Governments around the world are increasingly mandating the digitalisation of business records, yet little is known about the effects of these policies beyond tax compliance. This column discusses how mandatory electronic invoicing reshapes credit markets by changing the information available to lenders. The evidence shows that eInvoicing reallocates credit toward firms that already rely on invoice-based financing and away from other firms, as banks become better at assessing the credit risk of the former relative to the latter.

Digitalisation is reshaping how firms operate, make payments, and obtain financing (Goldfarb and Tucker 2019, Berg et al. 2022, Babina et al. 2024). Research has mainly focused on how payments are executed, paying relatively less attention to the invoicing infrastructure that underpins economic transactions. Governments, however, are digitising that infrastructure at a rapid pace. In the EU, the VAT in the Digital Age package allows member states to introduce mandatory electronic invoicing (eInvoicing), with digital reporting requirements for cross-border transactions from July 2030 (European Commission 2025). Italy has required eInvoicing for essentially all domestic transactions since 2019, while Spain’s national eInvoicing initiative, VeriFactu, is scheduled to start in January 2027. At the same time, many other countries in Europe, Latin America, and Asia are following similar paths. These mandates are usually enacted for tax enforcement, and evidence suggests they are effective at increasing tax compliance (Bellon et al. 2022, Fan et al. 2018). Yet, as we discuss in this column, their consequences may not be limited to the fiscal sphere. By standardising the records of business transactions and making them verifiable, eInvoicing mandates can spill over to credit markets, reshaping how they operate.

Our recent paper provides evidence that this is the case (Casado et al. 2026). We document how, after the introduction of a Spanish local eInvoicing mandate, credit shifts toward firms that used invoice financing before the reform (we refer to them as invoice firms) and away from firms that did not (non-invoice firms). We also document that banks become relatively better at differentiating credit risk among invoice firms than among non-invoice firms, and credit is reallocated accordingly.

The economic intuition is as follows. An invoice is more than a tax document: it records the parties to a transaction, its timing, and its value. Once such records are standardised and verifiable, they can improve a lender’s assessment of a borrower’s credit risk (Puri et al. 2018). The value of the new records, however, is not uniform. It is greatest where invoices already play a role in how a firm obtains credit: for invoice firms, verified records reinforce information already embedded in their financing arrangements; for non-invoice firms, the new records are less relevant. A uniform mandate can therefore generate uneven informational gains across borrowers, shifting credit toward the firms for whom the new records are more informative.

A natural experiment

We study an eInvoicing mandate called TicketBAI, which requires firms to issue invoices through certified software that assigns each record a unique identifier and transmits it to the provincial tax authority. Banks do not receive these records automatically – a firm must share them with its lender or authorise access. TicketBAI therefore changes more than the format of an invoice, as the records a firm can provide to a bank when seeking financing become easier to verify and harder to alter or duplicate.

TicketBAI was introduced only in Spain’s Basque Country and not in the surrounding areas, creating a clean difference-in-differences setting to isolate its effects. In particular, we focus on small and medium-sized firms in Álava and Biscay, where the mandate applied, and firms in the neighbouring provinces of Burgos, Cantabria, La Rioja, and Navarre (the control group), before and after January 2022. For our analysis, we use credit-register data from the Bank of Spain that allow us to track credit for approximately 24,700 firms between 2021 and 2024. We observe how much each firm borrows and the interest rates it pays, as well as, for banks using internal ratings, their assessments of borrowers’ default risk.

Credit shifts across firms

We document how on average the reform does not affect total firm credit. This average, however, conceals substantial heterogeneity. Total credit rises by approximately 1.1% for invoice firms and falls by approximately 1.4% for non-invoice firms, relative to the control provinces. We also find how for invoice firms the increase in credit is larger for invoice related types of credit. Figure 1 decomposes the expansion for invoice firms: invoice credit rises by about 2.1%, and other credit rises by about 0.9%.

Figure 1 eInvoicing reallocates credit across borrower types

Notes: Difference-in-differences estimates of the effect of the eInvoicing mandate on firm-level credit, with 95% confidence intervals. See Casado et al. (2026) for details.

The composition of this expansion matters. If verified invoices were valuable only as better collateral for invoice-based financing, such as factoring or confirming, the expansion should be confined to that segment. Instead, total credit rises, suggesting that the value of the new records extends beyond collateral. 

Quantities alone, however, cannot tell us whether demand or supply is driving these effects. Invoice firms may simply demand more credit after the reform, or banks may supply more. We therefore look at the cost of credit to understand what force dominates. A shift in credit supply moves quantities and prices in opposite directions: an expansion raises lending and lowers rates, while a contraction does the reverse. The data show exactly this pattern: invoice credit expands while its cost declines by approximately 2.6% for invoice firms, whereas credit contracts and borrowing costs rise for non-invoice firms. The joint movement of prices and quantities is therefore consistent with a shift in credit supply rather than credit demand.

The question, then, is why banks shift their credit supply to invoice firms. The answer lies in banks’ information production.

Banks’ information production

The increase in credit outside invoice-based financing suggests that digital invoices convey information about a borrower beyond the collateral they provide. If so, the reform should be reflected in how banks assess credit risk.

This is what we find. After the reform, the dispersion of loan rates across invoice firms widens, with the interquartile range rising by about 34%, while across non-invoice firms it narrows by about 17%. Banks’ internal probabilities of default move in the same directions (see Figure 2A). This means that banks differentiate more among invoice firms and less among non-invoice firms.

Greater differentiation is informative only if it aligns with actual default risk. We therefore examine whether banks’ internal probabilities of default are higher for borrowers who subsequently default, that is, how well banks’ risk estimates rank future defaults. The area under the ROC curve (AUROC) summarizes this ranking ability (Howes and Weitzner 2025).

Figure 2B turns to default ranking for the same borrower split. Before TicketBAI, banks ranked invoice firms in the treated provinces less accurately than their counterparts in the control provinces. After the reform, this gap disappears. Non-invoice firms move in the opposite direction: treated and control provinces start from similar levels, and a gap opens after the reform. Ranking ability improves in absolute terms for both groups; what changes is relative performance, which shifts toward invoice firms.

Figure 2 Information reallocation after eInvoicing

Notes: Panel A shows changes in the dispersion of loan rates and of banks’ internal probabilities of default; Panel B shows the difference in predictive accuracy (AUROC) of banks’ internal default estimates between treated and control groups. See Casado et al. (2026) for details.

Taken together, these results indicate that eInvoicing shifts the focus of banks’ information production. For borrowers whose activity is well captured by digital invoices, banks generate more precise risk assessments and expand credit; for the remaining borrowers, both screening and lending contract. The reform thus reallocates not only credit but also the information production that underpins it.

Common standards, uneven effects

Although our work focuses on the short-term effects of invoice digitalisation, what is already clear is that it changes which firms banks understand better, and credit follows the information banks find useful. In other words, common standards can reshape credit unevenly.

These findings matter as digital reporting spreads. Digitalisation policies mainly designed for one purpose can quickly spill over to other parts of the economy. Evaluating such policies therefore requires widening the lens beyond their main objectives to who gains and who loses access to finance and, ultimately, to the welfare implications. Whether the reallocation persists and eventually affects firms’ investment remains an open question.

Source : VOXeu