Yesterday, Thursday, April 18, the Movistar Center space in Barcelona hosted a meeting, organized by La Vanguardia and Pimec, in which innovation experts provided information and debated the necessary steps for SMEs and the self-employed to definitively add their businesses to the transformation. digital.
The speakers, in a meeting that was sponsored by Banco Sabadell and Telefónica, were Santiago Ribera, director of sustainable finance and next generation of the banking entity; Arantxa Doncel, Telefónica business manager in Catalonia; and Andreu Bru, director of the Technology and Innovation Department of Pimec. Among the audience, representatives of the small and medium-sized business sector, as well as experts in innovation and digitalization. Jordi Marín, expert in digital transformation and innovation, moderated the meeting.
In his speech, Santiago Ribera detailed the most relevant aspects of the new tools that will allow, for the first time and after their approval by the Council of Ministers last February, banks to have a specific and prominent role in the distribution of NextGen funds. EU. And they will do so through a common instrument, the ICO Mediation lines, which will be provided with two new lines, the ICO Green Line and the ICO-Companies and Entrepreneurs Line, and two funds that are specifically allocated, one to scale start-ups. technological and the other to the audiovisual hub.
As manager of Telefónica companies in Catalonia, Arantxa Doncel, took advantage of his intervention to, on the one hand, vindicate the technological nature of the company and its capabilities in cybersecurity, cloud migration and services related to IoT and big data and, on the other , emphasize that when it comes to digitalization “we all play by the same rules.” Doncel ended her speech by reminding the audience of the importance of understanding that, as entrepreneurs, “they must understand the impact of technology, but not necessarily be technologists.”
Andreu Bru dedicated his speech to a pragmatic aspect: how regulatory changes related to digitalization affect billing (computerized invoice registration and issuance of electronic invoices) of both companies and professionals. These are new developments that basically emanate from the Anti-Fraud Law, approved in 2021 and the Royal Decree of December 2023 that deploys it. The will of the legislator is to reinforce the issuance of invoices to avoid tax fraud by counting on the registration of computer systems that must guarantee the integrity of the entire process and be able to issue their invoice registration to the Tax Administration with all the guarantees. Bru pointed out the exceptions allowed and the applicable differences depending on the volume of billing before opening a question period that gave way to a discussion table between the speakers.
