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All along, I was thinking of a generic e-invoicing portal. Now, thanks to Rein G's comments, I suddenly realize that we are staring at not one, but multiple, portals.

To me, the adoption challenge seems to multiply for the following reasons: 

1. As I've commented before, even a single portal lacks a compelling reason for adoption either by suppliers or buyers. Can't imagine that the situation improves for a network of portals. 
2. Is there any guarantee that a single supplier company will only use one (brand of) portal? If not, supplier employees will have to get trained on different portals.
3. Surely each third-party portal provider will promise to deliver *all* invoices from *all* suppliers in the *same* ERP format, so that the buyer/payor would have to invest only *once* in integrating with *all* portals. In an industry that has a multiplicity even of standards, I'm not sure how many average buyers/payors from outside the industry will believe such promises.
4. I don't know why we are talking about forcing all customers to your own model. We are actually talking about forcing all suppliers to the buyer's/payor's model. Service to customers is mandatory. However, giving business and paying suppliers on time might be enough service from buyers/payors to suppliers. 

Forking out money is considered as one of the greatest sources of friction, as evidenced by the universal popularity of *FREE* offers. If I as a supplier can reduce some of that friction by agreeing to follow different invoicing process - be it portal or email or paper - of different buyers/payors, I will gladly do so in order to receive my payment on time.

When defined that way, I admit that generic e-invoicing portal is not a pipedream and I can think of at least three providers of such solutions, namely, PayPal, TradeShift and Intuit (Full Disclosure: Neither I nor my company have any business relationship with these companies). At the same time, their mass adoption is faced with several barriers.

From the perspective of buyers/payors, they become non-generic since the processing at their end would differ for e-invoices received from the multiple e-invoicing providers. If I recall correctly, an Intuit PaymentNetwork executive mentioned a couple of months ago that the challenge is to get buyers/payors to adopt such generic solutions. After all, from their perspective, why won't they like to get all invoices from all suppliers in a single format of their choosing, which appears possible only with a buyer-specific e-invoicing portal? 

Let's look at it from the supplier's perspective. For the supplier's C-Suite, I don't there can be any argument that the primary purpose of raising an invoice is to get paid as quickly as possible. Only the buyer whose name is on the invoice is going to make the payment. If one buyer wants their invoices on paper sent by snail-mail, another wants them as PDFs sent by email and the third one wants them to be published on their e-invoicing portal, it's not such a big deal for the supplier to comply with the diverse stipulations of the three buyers as long as doing so would expedite receipt of their payment. Therefore, even for a supplier, I fail to see a compelling reason to adopt non-buyer-specific generic e-invoicing portals. While they might cut down some wasteful effort in the invoicing department, that's negligible compared to the overall effort incurred by the supplier company in servicing the buyer.

"The AdWords Business credit card ... can only be used for spending on Internet advertising over the search engine." Is this closed loop card of the Google variety?

By generic e-invoicing portals, I understand that they provide identical user experience regardless of biller, bank or portal. When I read "to get there we need ... ", I thought you were highlighting a major challenge in establishing generic e-invoicing portals. Perhaps I misunderstood. If you've already achieved success in this area, maybe you could quote a few success stories.

While buyer portals will be buyer-specific, bank portals will also be bank-specific (try selecting the same utility in the bill pay pages of Internet Banking portals of two different banks, and you'll get my drift). Even third-party e-invoicing portals will inevitably acquire multiple flavors for different billers / banks as they try to boost their adoption.  Unfortunately, like e-billing portals that have been around for over a decade for consumer bills without much standardization, I'm afraid generic e-invoicing is also a pipedream. 

Let's say I'm in the market for a shirt (or a mobile phone or a book). For 'shirt', I appreciate Google Search dedicating enough resources to serve me about 972 million results in 0.21 seconds.  Unfortunately, I don't have the resources to review so many results - a lot of which are spam anyway - to make up my mind. If only I could search for 'shirt' inside Facebook. Even the 2-3 results from my friends would suffice. When I actually tried that using Facebook Search, I got one result from a friend for 'shirt'. However, I got none for 'mobile phone' or 'book', for which Facebook results only showed brand pages related to these items. If only Facebook showed more results from friends in a convenient way, I'd head to Facebook Search first and get results that are virtually endorsements. This illustrates the power of 'Social Search'.

The UK Payments Council may have been well-intentioned while announcing its proposal to drop cheques well ahead of the deadline. However, in hindsight, had it waited for a couple of years for better alternatives to cheques to emerge - none exist today according to a recent Daily Mail article, a view with which I completely agree* - the man on the street would've had the chance to experience them first hand. At that stage, the present hue and cry over "why not cheques?" would've automatically dissipated to "why cheques?".

* for reasons expressed in detail at  

https://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=22761

This just in from McKinsey Quarterly: "How Europe’s retail banks handle channel strategy".

While I'm still unable to download and read the full report, just the following takeaways from the introduction shed a lot of light on the channel preferences of customers and contain solid guidance for how banks should respond regionwise.  

1. Consumers ... want both electronic and physical contact points.
2. ... customers increasingly use face-to-face channels for sales and advice, and remote ones (the Internet and ATMs) for most transactions.
3. Density of branches will fall considerably in overbanked areas of Southern Europe but remain stable or even rise in parts of Central and Northern Europe.

I just came across a Daily Mail article today. The title of this article says it all: "... Cheques will not be scrapped in 2018 because there are no better alternatives".

Talking about costs, quite frankly I don't see why the man / woman on the street should care if banks incur higher costs for processing cheques: All costs of banks - including fat bonuses to its executives - are going to be passed on to him / her in one form or the other anyway. Why single out only the cost of cheque processing? However, my personal experience with Phone Banking and Internet Banking with two Indian and two European banks in the last 24 hours permits me the luxury of sticking to the topic of cheque processing costs. 

I'm willing to pay a bank some X amount for every cheque I write provided the bank pays me some Y amount for every ePayment that I'm unable to put through their telephone or website for no fault of mine viz. field length is too short to support the true size of the data element (e.g. beneficiary name); maintenance shutdown; inaccurate information, etc. Assuming X and Y are close to the respective costs incurred by each party, I'm very sure that I'll earn enough money from just one month of the latter to fund a lifetime of the former! 

Yeah, right. That's probably what WebVan thought of conventional grocery stores, INGDirect USA thought of conventional banks having branches, and digital pundits thought of conventional cheques. The first one crashed and burned after $$M in VC funding; the second one is just another channel of a conventional bank; as ilustrated by banks' recent decision on the third in the UK, I'm confident that banks know to place consumer preference and customer experience - cheque trumps ePayments on both - ahead of anything else while deciding the right mix of products / instruments / channels.