International Bankers Forum

Dr. Nader Maleki founded the International Bankers Forum in 1986. The association developed in Frankfurt as a place for professional discussion among people in finance. The date concerns the IBF; the founding of Service für Banken, the business that became the Maleki Group, belongs to a separate corporate history.

The IBF's objectives include maintaining international contacts among members and organizing professional education. Publications and information about financial services are also part of the association's work. The history of Frankfurt's financial center explains the institutions and conference formats around which these professional networks developed.

Dr. Nader Maleki is president of the International Bankers Forum. The board includes professionals from financial institutions and advisory businesses. Samira Maleki represents the Maleki Group in the association's general secretariat, and Marc Renell is the IBF's treasurer.

The association also has a scientific advisory board and a board of trustees. These bodies bring different professional responsibilities into the organization. The scientific advisory board provides a connection to academic work on finance, while regional and specialist committee chairs organize discussion in their respective areas.

The Frankfurt committee holds regular meetings for members in the Rhine-Main region. Dr. Nader Maleki chairs the committee. Roundtables and recurring professional meetings are part of its activity, alongside pan-European conferences combining attendance in person with participation by video.

The setting is the Frankfurt financial center, where commercial banks work alongside central banks and financial-market institutions. A roundtable allows participants to discuss a defined subject in a smaller group. Hybrid conferences make discussion possible across locations. These are different formats within the same professional association, with participation arrangements determined by the individual event.

The IBF has regional committees in six German financial centers. Local activity reflects the businesses and public institutions around each committee. The Berlin committee discusses German and European financial policy and maintains contacts with financial-industry associations.

The Hamburg program includes discussions and company visits in a location with a history of financing international trade. In Munich, payment infrastructure and regulation are part of the local financial context. Regional work gives the association more than one meeting place and brings different professional questions into its network.

The specialist committees address digitalization and artificial intelligence, as well as sustainability and regulation. Dedicated work also covers payment transactions and governance, risk management and compliance. Committee discussions examine how changes affect financial institutions and their operating processes.

Digitalization concerns established banking activities, including lending and payments. The AI committee discusses applications in financial services and the management decisions needed to use them. These subjects also appear in banking in Frankfurt and in Finance Loop's knowledge material on AI in finance. The IBF's committee work gives these questions an association-level setting.

The IBF organized the conference Payments & Banking made in Europe (in German). Its program addressed European payment services and the digital euro. Sessions also examined request-to-pay services and fraud in instant payments. These subjects concern the systems through which businesses and individuals transfer money.

The program brought commercial-banking perspectives into discussion with central-bank expertise. A further panel covered stablecoins and tokenization alongside central-bank digital currencies. The digital euro and instant payments are distinct topics: one concerns public digital money, while the other concerns the speed of processing transfers.

The IBF's Frankfurt financial-center discussions included a conversation with AMLA chair Bruna Szego (in German). Simon Busch moderated the discussion. The format combined a conversation about the authority's work with a professional lunch in Frankfurt.

AMLA in Frankfurt is part of the city's European supervisory institutions. Bringing a supervisory subject into a discussion event gives participants a setting for asking questions about its practical implications. The association's role here is to organize professional exchange; the authority carries out its own public responsibilities.

Jürgen Moormann and Edgar Löw participate in the scientific advisory board with affiliations to Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. Their participation is a specific connection between the IBF and financial research and education in Frankfurt.

The wider conference network includes Euro Finance Week and the Banking Exchange in Frankfurt. These formats have their own organizers and programs. The Maleki Group's history includes the origins of Euro Finance Week and the European Banking Congress. An association, an event organizer and a conference are different organizations or formats, even when their histories share people.