The European Business Register (EBR) is a commercial service that is fully recognised by the European Commission. It helps users to conduct business effectively and safely across borders, of particular importance for the European Single Market.
The EBR today offers registered users online access to the latest reliable information on companies and their managers. This data comes from the official company registers of 15 participating European countries. A company profile includes information on a business in a standardised and multilingual document, with contact details, registration, current status, business activities, share capital and date of the latest account. Data on company officials may include the board of directors, management owners/shareholders, and annual accounts.
The EBR website demonstrates the EBR system and the information it can provide. Anyone can subscribe to the service, although charges vary among the different national providers.
Stemming from research co-financed by the European Commission in 1992 and enhanced by a European project begun in 1996, the EBR system has recently been redesigned. Under the European Business Register-Open Network project, the system now covers more markets and offers further functions and services. It has been extensively tested in Estonia and Romania.
"Our system has a new technical interface, calling on XML and an open architecture," says Vito Giannella, a director of the EBR EEIG organisation in Brussels. "In addition to covering more companies and offering more data, the website now integrates with national company registries." Users can now do cross-country searches in a number of languages by company or request annual accounts and balance sheets in different formats.
EBR's geographic coverage is growing. Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Romania and Switzerland will join the network in 2004 and negotiations are under way with the national registers of Slovenia, Lithuania and the Czech Republic.
It may soon be possible to order documents not currently available online and to research enterprises based on their activity. A complementary pilot project, EBR-Trust and Internet, aims to publish a link on a company's website to the public business register that holds details about it. The system will be launched in 2004, probably beginning with Latvia.
Forging cross-border business
But even armed with such information, doing business across borders can be a headache for European firms. Faced with seemingly endless red tape from local and national authorities, many smaller enterprises abandon their expansion plans and stick to tried-and-tested markets closer to home.
Tackling bureaucracy problems is one of the goals of CB-Business. This two-year project - with partners from industry, academia, government agencies and chambers of commerce -built an electronic interface between industry and public administrations. The online hub calls on existing commercial applications and open source products, integrated with those of various service providers.
End-users, among them firms from Romania and Bulgaria, were surveyed to discover what cross-border services they wanted. Top of the list was information on business opportunities abroad, companies and products, fairs and exhibitions, and advice on setting up in other countries.
Transactional services provided by chambers of commerce in five partner countries were highly valued by the 180-plus registered users of the project's website, during the six-week test phase. Through the portal, users could obtain legal documents for exports, certificates that certify the origin for goods or the legal existence of a company, and search for potential business partners.
"The main innovation," says Soumi Papadopoulou, deputy project manager from the Greek company Planet, "is our one-stop shop for completing transactions and offering information services. Our workflow-based intermediation scheme is unique in Europe." She notes that a chamber of commerce in France can, for instance, reach its counterpart in Bulgaria and meet its request with just one document - saving time and money. Users ranked these two advantages first and second when asked about the usefulness of the CB-Business portal, followed by the ability to do business abroad without travelling and improved efficiency and quality of services.
If the portal is to develop, it will need to add e-signatures, authentication and e-payments. A project partner from Romania may soon market this software platform and set up a regional portal for cross-border services involving all SE European countries as well as EU countries.
"Enlargement countries have even greater need for such services than those in the rest of Europe," says Papadopoulou. She adds that the CB-Business platform is ideal for Western countries seeking to invest in the Union's new members, citing Greece and its wish to expand business with neighbours such as Bulgaria and Romania.
Quelle: IST Results, 29.04.2004
