Sustainable Smart Services for Financial Institutions: Evaluation of ESG Service Creation Framework Applicability for Practitioners

The ESG Service Creation Framework represents an innovative approach to the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations of the financial industry. It is designed to support the identification of the stakeholders in the service ecosystem and the potential of value co-creation. This work is concerned with the practical evaluation of the ESG Service Creation Framework. For this purpose, a series of expert interviews with specialists from the German-speaking financial sector were conducted, the evaluation of which is incorporated into the revision of the framework. The insights of the interviews, on the one hand, indicate the usefulness for such a framework especially for stakeholders less familiar with innovation processes. On the other hand, several suggestions for improvement were collected. The latter results are adopted to build an improved version of the framework and culminate in an illustrative service creation example. The evaluation of the framework, and the collection of valuable feedback contributes to the advancement of sustainable financial practices as well as the integration of ESG factors into corresponding products and services.