At SBS, we don’t just develop banking software – we embrace digital sustainability as a fundamental pillar of our business values. In an era where technology’s environmental footprint continues to grow, we recognize our responsibility as software providers to the financial sector to lead by example. Our commitment stems from a clear understanding: Exceptional software must be robust and responsible. As the financial services industry accelerates its digital transformation, the environmental and social impacts of banking technology can no longer be ignored. SBS has positioned itself at the forefront of this paradigm shift, integrating sustainability principles that deliver value across the entire software lifecycle.
“Our banking clients don’t need another headache—they need solutions that address multiple challenges simultaneously,” explains Xavier Rebeuf, Chief Product and Technology Officer at SBS. “When we demonstrate how digital sustainability reduces operational costs through efficient resource usage while also meeting expanding regulatory requirements and enhancing brand reputation, the conversation shifts from ‘Why should we care?’ to How can we implement this?’” Rebeuf adds.
“Regulatory compliance, particularly with the French government’s General Accessibility Improvement Framework [RGAA] and the General Repository for the Eco-design of Digital Services [RGESN), is taken into account in our approach to digital sustainability.”
Why digital sustainability matters for Banking Software
The financial sector’s rapid digitalization has revolutionized how people manage their money, but has also introduced significant environmental challenges. Banking software systems, with their complex architectures and high availability requirements, often demand substantial computational resources, including:
- Data centers powering financial services consume enormous amounts of energy.
- Legacy systems and inefficient code waste processing power and increase carbon footprints.
- Poorly optimized infrastructure leads to unnecessary resource consumption.
- Traditional development approaches often neglect accessibility, excluding millions of potential users.
At SBS, we recognize that these are not only challenges but also opportunities. By embracing digital sustainability, we transform potential constraints into competitive advantages that benefit our company, our clients, and their customers.
The business case: How sustainability drives value in Banking Software
Digital sustainability isn’t just about environmental responsibility—it creates tangible business value across multiple dimensions:
Why banking clients need digital sustainability
Financial institutions face unique pressures that make digital sustainability particularly valuable. Banks operate in a highly regulated environment, subject to increasing scrutiny of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, manage massive data operations with substantial energy footprints, and serve diverse populations with varying accessibility needs. Our banking clients must strike a balance between operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, customer inclusivity, and environmental responsibility while remaining competitive in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Digital sustainability addresses these challenges simultaneously by reducing operational costs through efficient resource usage, meeting expanding regulatory requirements for both accessibility and environmental impact, enhancing brand reputation in an increasingly eco-conscious market, and ensuring that digital services reach the broadest possible customer base.
For banks and financial institutions:
- Lower total cost of ownership: Following the refactoring of certain modules, such as authentication, experiments conducted on SaaS products within the banking suite have shown that memory and CPU consumption are reduced by a measured 20% to 25% in a Kubernetes environment.
- Improved customer experience: Optimized, accessible applications deliver faster response times and broader reach.
- Brand differentiation: Financial institutions can strengthen their ESG credentials through sustainable digital operations.
- Risk mitigation: Forward-looking sustainability practices reduce exposure to emerging regulatory and reputational risks.
For software editors like SBS:
- Enhanced product quality: Sustainable software is inherently well-architected, with cleaner code, better performance, and improved reliability.
- Cost efficiency: Optimized resource utilization directly translates to lower infrastructure costs and improved margins.
- Talent attraction and retention: Around 55% of respondents to a Deloitte survey say that they research brands’ environmental impact and policies before accepting a job.
- Regulatory readiness: Proactively adopting sustainable practices prepares for increasingly stringent digital regulations.
Market evidence:
- Financial institutions with strong digital sustainability programs are more likely to report higher customer satisfaction scores, with a Deloitte study finding that a quarter of Gen Z and millennials research a company’s environmental impact before buying a product or service from them.
- According to a 2025 survey by the Capgemini Research Institute, 82% of financial services firms consider environmental sustainability as a top priority.
SBS’s two-pillar approach to digital sustainability
Digital sustainability is built on four pillars: Eco-design, Accessibility, Ethics, and IT for green. At SBS, we’ve chosen to start our digital sustainability project by focusing on two of these pillars that address the social and environmental dimensions:
1. Accessibility: Banking for everyone
As digital technology continues to advance, a growing social divide is becoming increasingly likely. Today, everyone needs a device, whether a computer, smartphone, or tablet, to manage daily tasks such as paying taxes, making online purchases, filing claims, sending registered letters, and managing bank accounts and payments.
To ensure inclusiveness, these services must be user-friendly, enabling people of all ages to use them with ease. They must also function efficiently regardless of network coverage, such as in low-bandwidth areas.
Our first pillar focuses on ensuring that banking software is accessible to everyone, regardless of their abilities. This principle is grounded in both business logic and ethical imperatives:
- Universal design: We create banking experiences that accommodate diverse needs, abilities, and preferences.
- Standards compliance: We are committed to adhering SBS Cloud Component products to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and international accessibility standards.
- Continuous improvement: Accessibility is treated as an evolving requirement, not a one-time certification.
In 2023, according to the World Health Organization, prioritizing accessibility helps financial institutions serve the 1.3 billion people worldwide with disabilities — a significant market segment often underserved by digital banking solutions.
2. Eco-Design: Minimizing environmental impact
Our second pillar focuses on reducing the environmental footprint of our software through thoughtful design decisions:
- Resource-conscious architecture: Our software minimizes computational waste through efficient infrastructure design.
- Green coding practices: We implement development standards that optimize processing efficiency and energy consumption.
- Cloud optimization: Our deployment strategies maximize the efficiency benefits of modern cloud environments, including shutdowns, green regions, and autoscaling.
- Life cycle assessment: We support our clients in evaluating and reducing their digital carbon footprint through annualized life cycle assessments, enabling them to integrate IT-related emissions into their Scope 3 ESG reporting and target impactful areas in software architecture and infrastructure provisioning.
Our process: Integrating sustainability throughout the software lifecycle
Translating sustainability principles into practice requires a systematic approach. SBS has developed a comprehensive methodology that embeds digital sustainability from conception to deployment:
1. Assessment and planning
- Sustainability audits: Conduct annual detailed evaluations of existing systems against eco-design and accessibility benchmarks based on RGESN and RGAA, for strategic products such as RR and digital engagement. We aim to define the action plan to reduce the environmental impact through continuous improvement.
- Requirements Integration: Embed sustainability into Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) from the project’s outset.
- Objective Setting: Establish measurable sustainability targets for each development initiative.
- Project oversight: Create a dedicated executive committee to follow up and monitor key performance indicators at a high level.
- Specialist training: Provide training for IT teams to enhance skills and knowledge.
2. Design and architecture
- Architectural guidelines: Clear standards for creating efficient, accessible software architectures.
- Technology selection: Choosing frameworks and tools that support sustainability objectives.
- Performance modeling: Predictive analysis of resource utilization and accessibility impacts.
3. Development and testing
- Coding standards: Implementation of green coding practices across development teams, including Creendgo and GreenIT-Analysis.
- Accessibility testing: Automated and manual evaluations against WCAG standards.
- Resource monitoring: Continuous assessment of energy and computational efficiency. This includes our shutdown development instance and test instance during evenings or weekends.
4. Validation and acceptance
- Sustainability verification: Comprehensive testing against established sustainability criteria.
- Accessibility certification: Formal validation of accessibility compliance.
- Performance benchmarking: Measurement against industry efficiency standards.
5. Continuous improvement
- Monitoring framework: Ongoing assessment of sustainability metrics in production.
- Feedback integration: We plan to incorporate user experiences to enhance accessibility.
- Innovation pipeline: Continuously evolving our approach based on emerging best practices, such as Creendgo and GreenIT-Analysis.
Measured outcomes: The impact of digital sustainability
As part of our commitment to digital sustainability, SBS aims to deliver measurable results with our banking applications, such as faster load times and reduced resource utilization. We also expect our accessible design approach to expand the potential user base for client institutions, contribute to infrastructure cost reductions, and consume less energy than comparable legacy systems through a combination of memory optimization and storage rationalization.
Conclusion: Leading the way to sustainable Digital Banking
At SBS, digital sustainability isn’t just an add-on feature. It’s woven into everything we create. By embracing accessibility and eco-design as core principles, we’re not just building better banking software but helping shape a financial technology ecosystem that serves everyone while respecting planetary boundaries. Our approach demonstrates that sustainability and business success are not competing priorities but complementary forces. As the financial sector continues its digital evolution, SBS remains committed to leading the way in developing powerful, inclusive, and environmentally responsible solutions.
Through our continued innovation in digital sustainability, we’re creating lasting value for our business, clients, and society, proving that the most successful banking software isn’t just the most powerful, but also the most sustainable.