In an era where sustainability is paramount, understanding the environmental impact of digitalizing business processes is critical. Despite the growing emphasis on sustainable practices, there is a lack of comprehensive methodologies to evaluate how digitalization impacts environmental sustainability compared to traditional processes. This paper introduces a carbon-aware methodological framework specifically designed to assess the sustainability of business process reengineering through digitalization. The Digital Green framework quantitatively analyzes the environmental costs associated with digital transformation, ensuring that truly sustainable digitalization results in lower resource consumption relative to the complexity of the process being digitalized. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the framework was applied to a case study involving the reengineering of an administrative process at a small university in southern Italy. The case study highlighted the framework’s ability to quantify the environmental benefits or detriments of digital transformation, thus guiding organizations toward more sustainable digital practices. This research contributes to the field by offering a concrete tool for aligning digitalization efforts with ecological sustainability, and by paving the way for integration with initiatives such as the Green Software Foundation’s Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specifications.

The growing phenomenon of bank branch closures, driven by increasing operational costs and the need to meet specific KPIs, represents a significant challenge for both customers and banks. The closure of branches, especially in remote areas, reduces access to banking services and damages the image and influence of banks in the community, undermining customer trust. To address this issue, a potential solution draws inspiration from the experience of Open Banking, which has revolutionized the financial sector through digitalization. The idea is to extend this philosophy to bank branches, creating what can be defined as "Open Branching" (OB). This term refers to a technology-enabled branch where all services traditionally offered in-person can also be accessed digitally. Open Branching allows branches to offer a wide range of digital services through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), maintaining the interface and experience of a traditional branch while enhancing accessibility and efficiency by integrating the physical and digital worlds. In collaboration with a major Italian Bank and the Bank of Italy as part of the MilanoHub program, we developed and standardized a taxonomy of key branch-customer products and services, categorized by type (e.g., with and without authentication, account information, loans, withdrawals), and released it under an open-source license. This standard enable third-party operators to enhance the Customer Experience in traditional branches, much like Open Banking has done with online services. The validity of the standard was demonstrated through a case study focused on branch service access through the Metaverse, highlighting the effectiveness and potential of this innovation.