If you have looked into Peppol seriously, you have come across the term Access Point. You might have even considered building your own. Here is what that actually involves and why most companies decide against it.
What an Access Point Does
A Peppol Access Point is the certified gateway between your platform and the Peppol network. Every message that travels over Peppol passes through an Access Point on each end, the sender's and the recipient's. That is the four-corner model.
Concretely, an Access Point handles:
- SMP registration - publishing your participants to the Peppol directory so they can be discovered by other Access Points
- AS4 transport - wrapping invoices in signed, encrypted AS4 messages and transmitting them to the correct recipient Access Point
- Certificate management - using Peppol-issued production certificates to sign every outbound message
- Delivery receipts - receiving and processing acknowledgements that confirm the message arrived
- Transaction reporting - submitting TSR and EUSR reports to the Peppol Authority on a defined schedule
What It Takes to Build One
Becoming a certified Peppol Access Point is not a development task. It is a compliance programme.
You start by applying to OpenPeppol and signing the Service Provider Agreement. Then comes the technical onboarding - setting up the AS4 messaging infrastructure, integrating with the SML for participant registration, and configuring production PKI certificates issued by Peppol.
Before you go live, you complete formal acceptance testing on the Peppol testbed. Only after passing do you receive production certification.
Once certified, the obligations continue. You must maintain uptime SLAs, handle certificate renewals, submit regular transaction reports, and stay current with Peppol specification updates. OpenPeppol audits compliance on an ongoing basis.
One company we spoke to at a recent industry event had been outsourcing their B2G invoicing entirely to a third party. Not because they lacked the technical capability. Because the operational overhead of maintaining Peppol connectivity was not something they wanted to own.
When Building Makes Sense
If you are a large ERP vendor processing millions of invoices annually across multiple countries, the economics of running your own Access Point can make sense. The fixed compliance cost becomes negligible at scale.
For most SaaS and hosting companies, it does not. You are not in the business of operating Peppol infrastructure. Your customers need compliance. That is a different problem.
The Alternative
Connect to an existing certified Access Point via API. Your platform sends invoice data to an endpoint. The Access Point handles SMP registration, AS4 transport, certificate management, delivery receipts, and reporting. Your customers are compliant. You stay focused on your product.
Connect your platform to Peppol without building an Access Point.