Perspectives, Needs and Challenges for Sustainable Software Engineering Teams: A FinServ Case Study

Background: Sustainable Software Engineering (SSE) is slowly becoming an industry need. While general perspectives of SSE have been studied, little is known about the context-specific sustainability needs and constraints of sectors like financial services, which are highly regulated, data-intensive, and handle millions of transactions daily. Aim: To address this gap, our research focuses on a financial services company (FinServCo) that invited us to investigate perspectives on sustainability in their IT function: how it could be put into practice, who is responsible for it, and what the challenges are. Method: We conducted an exploratory qualitative case study using interviews and a focus group with six higher management employees and 16 software engineers comprising various experience levels from junior developers to team leaders. Results: We found a clear divergence in how sustainability is perceived across organisational levels. Higher management focused on technical and economic aspects, such as cloud migration and business continuity through data availability, while developers emphasised human-centric concerns like workload and stress. Some developers were sceptical of organisational motives, viewing initiatives as PR-driven. Key challenges included knowledge gaps, cultural resistance, legacy systems, and limited client demand. Many participants favoured a dedicated sustainability team, often drawing comparisons to established security governance structures. Conclusions: SSE is shaped by organisational roles, cultural dynamics, and sector-specific constraints. The disconnect between organisational goals and individual developer needs highlights the importance of context-sensitive, co-designed interventions. Study material containing codebook and the interview questions file: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16359596