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Spotlight PEPPOL BIS Billing 3.0 The EU e-invoicing mandate is here — France Sept 2026, Belgium Jan 2026, Germany 2025.

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TRADING-PARTNER

The counterparty in an EDI exchange. A stable legal entity, persistently identified, attached to a documented exchange agreement.

Definition

A trading partner is a legal entity with which one exchanges EDI documents. For an EDI partnership to exist technically, three minimum elements must be set:

  • Persistent identification: each partner is identified by a stable code — GLN (GS1, 13 digits), DUNS (Dun & Bradstreet, 9 digits), PEPPOL identifier (0009:SIRET, 0192:OrgNr), proprietary VAN internal code, or qualified ICD.
  • Trading Partner Agreement (TPA): a document — in the OASIS ebXML CPP/CPA sense — that formalises which documents are exchanged, in which syntax, over which protocol, at what frequency, under what SLA, and with which acknowledgment mechanisms. Today the TPA is rarely automated; it often lives in a wiki, PDF, or Trading Partner Profile (TPP) proprietary to an EDI broker.
  • Technical profile: URLs/IPs, X.509 certificates, optional PGP keys, timestamp formats, time zone, send calendar.

Classic roles a trading partner may play: buyer, supplier, carrier (3PL), distributor, distribution centre (DC), payment service provider (PSP), buying central, public administration.

Origin

The structured notion of trading partner appeared in the VANs of the 1980s — where each mailbox was precisely a trading partner. With internet EDI (AS2 from 2002), the notion gained a cryptographic codification: each trading partner is now also identified by its X.509 certificate. OASIS published in 2002 the ebXML Collaboration Protocol Profile and Agreement (CPP/CPA) specification, formalising the TPA notion — little deployed but conceptually fundamental.

Example in context

A French retailer has 1,200 active EDI suppliers. Its trading partner base records, for each: primary GLN, GLN per delivery site, supplier bank details, send calendar (e.g. INVOIC between 19:00 and 22:00 each working day), expected format (EDIFACT D.96A INVOIC, or PEPPOL BIS Billing 3.0 for new entrants), transport (AS2 to the retailer's URL, or PEPPOL Access Point), active certificate and expiry date, technical contact, incident escalation. Any update to any of these fields triggers a TPA update and a bilateral retest.

  • Onboarding — the process of activating a trading partner.
  • GLN — the most frequent identifier in retail.
  • DUNS — the most frequent identifier in North America.
  • ICD — the identifier qualifier.

Last updated: May 14, 2026