Capital markets in Frankfurt
Deutsche Börse runs the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, Xetra and Eurex from Frankfurt, and the big banks keep their equity and debt capital markets teams here. Anyone who issues shares or bonds in the city follows the EU rules for prospectuses and trading. Finance Loop events for capital markets people are in the calendar below.
What capital markets means, in plain words
Capital markets are where companies and governments raise long-term money by selling shares and bonds, and where investors then trade those securities with each other. A company that needs funding for a decade can borrow from a bank or sell securities to the public; the second route runs through the capital market. The job inside a bank splits the same way: equity capital markets (ECM) teams arrange share issues such as an IPO, and debt capital markets (DCM) teams arrange bond issues.
Frankfurt is where this work concentrates in Germany because the country's main exchange sits here. The Deutsche Börse Group, headquartered in Frankfurt, operates the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (Frankfurter Wertpapierbörse) as an entity under public law, with its own Trading Surveillance Office monitoring conduct on the exchange and the Exchange Supervisory Authority of Hesse overseeing it at state level.
Xetra, Eurex and the banks that trade on them
Xetra, the electronic trading system Deutsche Börse introduced in 1997, carries the large majority of share trading at German exchanges and sets the prices used to calculate the DAX, the index of Germany's largest listed companies. Eurex, the group's derivatives exchange, is one of the largest in Europe for futures and options, and Clearstream, its post-trade unit, settles and safekeeps the securities that trade on both.
Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, Germany's two largest private banks, run capital markets desks from their Frankfurt head offices, arranging share and bond issues for corporate clients. DWS Group and Union Investment, the city's largest fund managers, sit on the buy side of the same market, deciding which of those issues to invest in on behalf of savers.
The EU law behind an issue and a trade
An issuer that offers securities to the public in the EU needs a prospectus under the Prospectus Regulation, which took effect in 2019 and sets what the document must disclose. Trading itself runs under MiFID II, which defines a trading venue as a regulated market, a multilateral trading facility or an organized trading facility, and sets conduct rules for the firms trading on it. BaFin investigates suspected insider trading and market manipulation at the federal level, working alongside the state-level exchange supervisors.
The European Commission has pushed to deepen these markets since 2015 under the capital markets union, widened in 2025 into the savings and investments union. Its starting figure is a stark one: about 70 percent of household savings in the EU, worth an estimated EUR 10 trillion, sit in bank deposits, not in capital markets, which the plan aims to change by making it easier for savers to invest directly.
Upcoming finance events in Frankfurt
Capital markets and Finance Loop
Finance Loop is the meeting place in Frankfurt for equity and debt capital markets teams, exchange staff and the fintechs building on top of them. It connects the finance, IT and AI communities and is built in collaboration with TechQuartier and Frankfurt Main Finance, which Finance Loop has been a member of since October 2024.
Finance Loop was a partner of Frankfurt Digital Finance at the Gesellschaftshaus Palmengarten, where capital markets and digital assets shared the agenda. Related pages: asset management in Frankfurt and finance in Frankfurt.
What does capital markets mean at a bank?
At a bank, capital markets is the division that arranges share and bond issues for corporate and government clients and trades those securities afterward. Equity capital markets covers share issues, debt capital markets covers bonds, and both sit apart from retail banking, which serves individual customers instead of issuers and institutional investors.
What is the capital markets union?
The capital markets union is the European Commission's plan to join the national capital markets of the EU member states into a single market for capital. Adopted first in 2015 and widened in 2025 into the savings and investments union, it aims to give EU savers, most of whose money sits in low-yielding bank deposits, easier access to capital markets investment. Frankfurt, as the seat of Germany's main exchange, is one of the markets the plan aims to connect more closely with the rest of the EU.
Capital markets and Finance Loop
Frankfurt hosts Germany's main stock exchange, its central banks and the capital markets desks of the country's largest banks, and Finance Loop brings the people who work there together with asset managers, fintech founders and regulators at events in the city and in Munich, Berlin and Hamburg. More on the network is on the About page.
Finance Loop is a professional network and has the goal of driving the adoption of emerging technologies in finance, such as AI, tokenization, stablecoins, and DeFi. Finance Loop helps its members build skills and personal networks in these fields: Investment & Digital Assets, Payments & Digital Money, and Risk & Compliance.