First, tell us about UBS
UBS is the world’s largest, truly global wealth manager and as part of this has a vast technology portfolio and computing footprint. The delivery and management of this estate is the Chief Digital and Information Office (CDIO). This group delivers digital and data-driven solutions that provide services to our clients that are personal, relevant, on-time and seamless. CDIO is also responsible for championing the adoption of a single, consistent agile set-up across UBS, for driving transformational and sustainable approaches to real estate strategy and technology deployment, and for implementing an effective approach to operational resilience across the firm.
What does UBS plan to achieve together with the Green Software Foundation?
UBS approaches sustainability as a constant expression of our purpose as a company. We have been at the forefront of sustainable finance for more than two decades and we are one of the financial industry’s leading forces for driving positive, long-term change. As part of our ongoing commitment, we want to ensure that the technology enabling UBS all over the world is as sustainable as possible too.
The work we plan to undertake with the Green Software Foundation (GSF) is about adopting a new paradigm for software development—one that shifts towards greener outcomes and lower carbon emissions from our digital ecosystem. Through this relationship we want to find ways to shift culture, behaviours and create new approaches and models for creating and managing apps, platforms and services that consume less energy and are more thoughtful in their use and consumption of power.
As early adopters of the cloud within the financial services industry, we have also made progress in our ability to calculate our carbon emissions as we systematically move from on-premise solutions into the cloud. We hope to share some of these learnings and best practices with other members within our industry and with GSF members overall in hopes to evolve learnings and scale these practices.
How does UBS see the future of green software?
Green software is still an emerging discipline and concept and we will build momentum through co-developing with trusted partners, launching minimum viable products (MVPs), pilot projects and initiatives. Our hope is that a greener approach to software development will scale across our vast community of developers and engineers.
This community is so important to achieving critical mass as they are the ones that will create the code, patterns, APIs and infrastructure as code available for others to reuse and adopt more widely.
We see the widespread use of green software and greener development practices as both a cultural and mindset shift, a change in the approach to the software itself.
The commitment that UBS has to sustainability will play a huge role in driving this shift within our global teams.
What challenges do you see ahead and how to overcome them?
Changing behaviours and mindset will always be a challenge when it comes to introducing new ways of doing things. And this is as true for software as it is for anything else. Additionally, scaling new development practices is something we see as a short term challenge. Together with the GSF community, we hope to bring in different perspectives and approaches to how we can scale greener software across such a large organisation.
Education will always play a major role in helping people develop new skills. We will tackle this by enabling learning on green software and clean coding available through our learning platforms.
Finally, we can’t underestimate the power of our development and engineering community at UBS. Through influential groups like our Distinguished and Certified Engineers we hope to arm them with the tools and information they need to advocate for greener software.
If we place the challenge of reducing our carbon emissions and creating a greener future for the next generation in the capable hands of our people, we will see the best possible outcomes.
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