gr-ne-schnittstellen-warum-nachhaltigkeit-in-der-versicherungs-it-bei-den-daten-beginnt

{ "content": "25.09.2026 Sasha Justmann\n# Green APIs: Why Sustainability in Insurance IT Begins with Data\nWhy sustainability in insurance IT does not start with reporting, but with the question of how data is structured.\n\nSustainability is long past being a peripheral issue in the insurance industry, affecting only asset management or product development. Two questions are frequently conflated here: How can IT make its own operations more sustainable – and how can IT help to make sustainability measurable in the rest of the value chain? Both perspectives directly affect the BiPRO ecosystem.\n\n## Regulatory Pressure: Why 2026 is Becoming a Turning Point\n\nFor many insurers, the driver is regulation. Although the EU Commission’s Omnibus I package has raised the CSRD thresholds – generally, only companies with more than 1,000 employees and over 450 million euros in turnover will be mandated in future, 2026 is considered a transitional year for CSRD, ESRS revision, and the EU Taxonomy. At the same time, starting in 2026, small and non-complex credit institutions as well as captive insurance undertakings will also fall under the reporting obligation for the first time, including climate protection reporting according to ESRS E1, coupled with the EU Taxonomy Regulation regarding the disclosure of taxonomy-aligned revenues and investments.\n\nWhat looks like a financial reporting issue is actually a data problem: Without structured product, contract, and claims data, neither a corporate carbon footprint nor a taxonomy ratio can be reliably reported. This is precisely where the IT perspective begins.\n\n## Sustainability in IT: Making the Infrastructure Itself Greener\n\nThe first perspective concerns IT as a driver of resource consumption. With the Energy Efficiency Act (EnEfG), the German legislator has imposed a dedicated energy law compliance regime on data centres for the first time: New data centres starting operations from 1 July 2026 must maintain a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) value of maximum 1.2, existing facilities must follow suit with 1.5 by 2027 and 1.3 by 2030. In addition, there is a phased obligation for waste heat utilisation and – already since 2024 – the requirement to increasingly cover energy demand from renewable sources, fully accounted for by balance sheet from 2027. Violations risk fines of up to 100,000 euros, and in certain cases up to 200,000 euros. Anyone purchasing IT services or operating their own data centres should be aware of these figures – not only for compliance reasons, but because they are increasingly becoming part of tender criteria.\n\nBeyond hardware and hosting, however, it is worth looking at a dimension that is often overlooked in the discussion: data architecture itself. Every unstructured interface – a PDF that first needs to be read via OCR, a portal that is scraped, a document that an AI must first \"understand\" before the contained data can be further processed – generates additional computing effort that simply does not arise with a standardised, structured interface. A BiPRO-normalised message is already available in machine-readable form and does not need to be reinterpreted. Viewed as a single transaction, this difference is small – but across a market-wide BiPRO infrastructure connecting a multitude of insurers with thousands of distribution partners, the effect scales: a transformation normalised once is reused many times over, instead of every connection operating its own individual data preparation. Whether and to what extent this translates quantitatively into CO₂ equivalents has not yet been systematically investigated – but the connection between the degree of standardisation and avoided processing effort is obvious and would be worth proving empirically.\n\n## Sustainability Through IT: When Data Makes Risks Visible\n\nThe second perspective reverses the relationship: IT not as a consumer, but as an enabler of sustainability. And here, claims statistics provide a drastic background. Natural disasters caused global damages of around 224 billion US dollars in 2025, of which approximately 108 billion US dollars were borne by the insurance industry – around 17,200 people lost their lives, significantly more than in the previous year. Over 90 percent of these damages are attributable to weather events, not earthquakes or other geological causes. The European Environment Agency reaches a similarly urgent conclusion in its first European Climate Risk Assessment: 36 identified climate risks across five risk clusters, more than half of which already require urgent action today.\n\nFor insurers, these figures are not abstract sustainability metrics, but their core business – premium calculation, reinsurance strategy, location assessment. However, for climate risk data, property, and natural hazard claims data to be factored into tariffing and claims processes in the first place, they must be structured and interface-compatible. How practically this is already being implemented was demonstrated at the Sustainable Insurance Convention 2026 in Leipzig: A practical example presented there by an insurer has been trialling a \"green cycle\" in the motor insurance line for six months, where repair shops can source used replacement parts for accident vehicles via specialised platforms – a concrete circular economy approach in claims management that would not be scalable without a structured connection to these platforms. Also noteworthy is a second example from the same event: participating companies presented the concept of a central \"trust platform\" that bundles ESG-relevant corporate data modelled on credit bureaus – instead of every insurer having to collect the exact same data individually and manually from its existing customers. This very principle – one source, many users, instead of many individual queries – is essentially the same one that BiPRO interfaces have been implementing for contract and claims data for years.\n\n## Action Areas: A Checklist for Self-Assessment\n\nIf you want to check in your own company or with partners in a structured manner where sustainability and IT converge, you can use the following questions as a guide:\n\n- Data Centre & Hosting: Do your own or procured data centres already meet the EnEfG requirements regarding PUE value, share of green electricity, and waste heat utilisation – and is this contractually fixed with service providers?\n- Data Architecture: How often is the same information (contract data, documents, portfolio data) redundantly collected anew, rendered, or extracted via AI from unstructured sources, even though a structured interface already exists or would be possible?\n- Supply Chain & Service Providers: Can IT service providers and software houses provide evidence of energy efficiency and sustainability measures upon request, for example within the scope of supply chain due diligence obligations?\n- Product Level: Is it recognisable within your own product portfolio which sustainability aspects a tariff addresses – climate protection, circular economy incentives, social components – or does this information exist only scattered across marketing texts?\n- Reporting Capability: Can ESG-relevant data be exported in machine-readable form from core systems, or would they have to be compiled manually for every CSRD or taxonomy disclosure?\n\nParticularly the last and second-to-last points show where there is a gap in the industry's current data model.\n\n## Impulses from the Industry Association: BiPRO e.V. Explores Action Areas\n\nThat sustainability is also becoming relevant for standardisation work itself is currently evident at BiPRO e.V. As part of ongoing digitalisation offensives and standardisation projects, the association is currently looking into which action areas in this field could become relevant for its members. Discussions include reducing the environmental footprint of the member companies themselves, the question of whether the use of BiPRO standards in itself constitutes an independent sustainability contribution – a thought that coincides with the consideration outlined above regarding avoided redundant data processing – as well as concrete use cases: How could normalised interfaces and recommendations based on them also support the product decisions of customers in the future, for example by making sustainability features of insurance products comparable? Naturally, a finished result is not yet available here – the exploration is in an early phase. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy because it shows that the topic has arrived in the industry's standardisation work and is no longer discussed solely within individual companies.\n\n## Looking Ahead: A Sustainability Attribute in the BiPRO Product Model\n\nOne of the use cases outlined above – supporting product decisions through normalised interfaces – is already taking concrete shape. The product model of the BiPRO standards world – described essentially by the 300ff. standards and particularly Standard 310 – already maps today what components an insurance product is composed of and how this structure is specified line-by-line via the TAA standards (421 to 426). What was previously missing in this model was a standardised, transferable way to map sustainability aspects of a product – not as free text in the policy conditions, but as a structured attribute that an insurer maintains once and which automatically reaches all connected distribution partners via existing interfaces – in comparative calculators, broker management programs, and customer advisory systems. Exactly this gap is what current standardisation work is addressing: In the ongoing release generation, a corresponding attribute is currently being developed, which is scheduled to be ready for concrete use with future releases.\n\nSuch an attribute does not have to be binary (\"sustainable yes/no\"), but can map multiple dimensions, similar to the logic of the ESRS environmental standards: Does the product contain incentives for the circular economy? Do climate risk data factor into tariffing? Is there a social component? Given the growing number of market monitors and product databases for sustainable insurance products, which are currently emerging in parallel and inconsistently, a unified database via established BiPRO interfaces is the more obvious path than every provider defining their own format.\n\n## Conclusion\n\nThe sustainability debate in insurance IT is often conducted either as a pure compliance topic or as a pure infrastructure topic. Both fall short. The actual lever lies where both perspectives converge: in data that is captured in a structured manner once, but can be used multiple times – for the automotive repair shop just as much as for the sustainability report. Standardisation was never an end in itself for the insurance industry. When it comes to sustainability, it becomes a prerequisite." }