Founded by three Danes with a background in creating large-scale government and European level invoicing systems, the start-up also numbers Morten Lund from Skype and Jon Bosak of XML fame among its board members.

The Tradeshift platform promises to steal a march on bank and credit card-based payment systems by offering free, legally-binding transactions to small businesses worldwide. The system is launching in Denmark this week with the UK, Germany and a number of Bric economies to follow over the coming months.

Recent research by Deutsche Bank indicates that e-finance is less popular among small firms. The shortfall is most evident when it comes to more advanced features of e-finance, with only 21% of SMEs sending or receiving electronic invoices and barely 29% using automated data exchange for sending payment instructions to financial institutions.

The European Commission has estimated that every year handling, transporting and creating paper invoices cost government and companies more than €64 billion.

Tradeshift plans to offer e-invoicing as a free lure to small businesses and charge a flat rate subscription for larger enterprises and governments, who will additionally be able to access smart applications for exchange rate monitoring and dynamic supply chain management.

The Tradeshift platform is 100% standards compliant with new EU regulations, says Tradeshift CEO, Christian Lanng, and offers interfaces to existing legacy transaction networks including EDI and major ERP systems including SAP and Oracle eBusiness Suite.

"I believe that modern business software has grown too complex and difficult to use for most businesses," he says. "Our goal was to create something extremely simple, that allows all small businesses to replace their paper processes with electronic ones."