The Fintech Hub Frankfurt

A fintech startup at the hub gets in touch with banks and insurers that test new products. TechQuartier counts more than 750 startups and over 30 corporate partners in its network and has run 170 programs since 2018. Its current list has a Digital Finance program, Fundraising Readiness for founders before a round, an accelerator and Hessen10 for startups from the state of Hesse. The coworking floors have more than 240 desks.

For a bank or another established company, de:hub describes a route from a named problem to a pilot with a startup and then to scale. The de:hub offer for companies has a Program Finder, an Expert Finder and the de:hub Journey, which takes owners and managers of mid-sized firms to test labs and coworking spaces in the hubs. Investors use the Start-up Finder, which lists more than 1,000 startups from all de:hubs and lets investors and companies contact them directly. At the de:hub Pitch Night, eight selected startups with use cases already tested in industry or the public sector pitch to investors, corporate leaders and policymakers.

Payments is one of the fintech fields the hub works on. TechQuartier and VR Payment run the Payment Roundtable, a closed format for heads of payment service providers, payment strategists and compliance officers. Its first edition dealt with regulatory risk, the growth potential of card payments and how payment service providers can work together. The wider payments scene of the city is on payments in Frankfurt.

TechQuartier also works outside finance. The de:hub page on Frankfurt names AI, quantum computing, GreenTech and mid-sized companies as further fields. TechQuartier hosts the IMPACT FESTIVAL, which it calls "Europe's largest B2B event for sustainable innovation", and the Tech & Data Lab Frankfurt.

In April 2016 Deutsche Börse opened a fintech hub with about 60 workstations for its first four startups. It was part of the fintech initiative of the Hessian state government, which planned a startup center for the Frankfurt fintech cluster. That center is TechQuartier. The State of Hesse, the City of Frankfurt, Goethe University, Frankfurt Main Finance and the development bank WIBank carried the project, and it was to open in the Pollux tower with 114 workplaces, as Private Banking Magazin reported (in German). De:hub now names WIBank, Goethe University, TU Darmstadt and the City of Frankfurt as its shareholders.

A Startup Genome survey named fintech one of three internationally competitive fields of the Frankfurt startup scene. Of the venture capital raised in Frankfurt between 2012 and 2017, 55 percent went into fintech.

Finance Loop is based at TechQuartier and holds many of its evenings there. The afterwork party TechClub 25/3 ran in collaboration with TechQuartier, as did the Sibos 2025 side event presented by Frankfurt Main Finance and OKX Institutional. The MarketVector Indexes panel on index investing and digital assets took place at TechQuartier, and TechQuartier co-hosted Navigating the Future of Finance, a Chainlink panel with Finance Loop.

It is TechQuartier, the de:hub for fintech in Frankfurt. The de:hub initiative of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy has 25 hubs, each with a city and a sector, and Frankfurt carries the sector FinTech. The page on the Digital Hub Initiative describes the whole network.

No. The Digital Hub FrankfurtRheinMain is an association that the City of Frankfurt founded with companies such as DE-CIX to promote the region as a digital node. The fintech hub in the de:hub network is TechQuartier.

Berlin has the second fintech hub, run by the House of Finance and Tech and described on de:hub Berlin. Insurance has two hubs: InsurLab Germany in Cologne and the InsurTech Hub Munich.