EDIFRANCE

International Role of EDIFRANCE

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) offer enormous opportunities for trade, job growth, efficiency improvement and economic development.

ICTs provide a platform for building and applying knowledge, facilitating participation in trade for isolated communities, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large corporations, improving national competitiveness, increasing human resource skills, and improving the delivery of public and private services.

Key concepts to pave the way for the transition to a Digital Economy

Internet is inevitably causing greater dematerialisation of exchanges and reduced use of paper. Greater recourse to digital commerce is tantamount to building a new digital economy and a new methodology: the Internet Digital Exchange.

Dematerialisation and interoperability

In order to achieve this goal, we must take into account of dematerialisation and interoperability. Thanks to current communication networks, we can communicate with one to another with electronics means.

Communication techniques are changing and recourse to intermediaries is playing an increasingly important role as far as emerging schemas are concerned. Relations between individuals are becoming more complex and more organised.

A breakdown in information, as far commercial and financial transactions (banking in particular) are concerned, has become out of the question. All players currently on the commercial scene have consequently made provision for full integration of their evaluation and processing chains (loan transactions, payment via Internet etc).
The transition towards the New Economy requires the support of increased security and stronger performance. When international networks are used every day, information flows are managed on a " zero risk " basis. The need to build up confidence, a prerequisite to any financial transaction, has resulted in widespread recourse to intermediaries offering legal guarantees for end-to-end information routing.

Digital recording of transactions has to be rendered failsafe, as paper records no longer have the same contractual value. All these elements of proof are needed in order to guarantee commercial and financial transactions.

On a worldwide scale, risk ratio criteria are in the process of becoming key factors that have to be organised on a sector basis and monitored to a state-of-the-art level.

Reliable Third Parties

Optimal organisation of the market hings upon the regulation of exchanges. Regulation cannot be achieved without transparency and perfectly-orchestrated task allocation. Against this backdrop, the role of Reliable Third Party, which could naturally be conferred upon the Administration, is crucial: it represents one of the most important cogs in the regulatory wheel.

Security, particularly on the internet, cannot be guaranteed without neutral and reliable third parties in a position to arbitrate between banks that specialise in payment and those that specialise in credit management, for instance.