Payment & Banking: the media company behind the German payments year
Anyone who follows German payments reads Payment & Banking. Its own front page sets out the subject as "Fintech, Payments und digitales Banking im Fokus", and that is what the site delivers: daily articles, a podcast with more than ten years of back catalog, infographics on who does what in German payments, and four conferences a year that the industry treats as its meeting points.
Behind the site is PBA Experts GmbH in Munich. Maik Klotz answers for the content and Nicole Nitsche runs the company. The imprint lists the shareholders as André M. Bajorat, Maik Klotz, Jochen Siegert, Kilian Thalhammer, Rafael Otero and Miriam Wohlfarth. Payment & Banking is a publisher, not a bank and not a payment service provider, which is why the people there say in public what a bank employee says off the record.
What Payment & Banking publishes
The site sorts its work into Payment, Banking, AI, Leute, Infografiken and Kolumne. The reporting stays close to the German market: the girocard in an in-app checkout, the Wero rollout, a BaFin enforcement wave, the valuation of a spend-management fintech. Guest articles from law firms and consultancies sit beside the editorial pieces, and sponsored posts carry a label.
For a payments team the infographics are the most useful part. Payment & Banking has mapped the German fintech market, the payment licensing picture and the open banking providers for years, and those maps turn up in bank presentations more often than they get credited. The regulatory ground under the reporting is on payments regulation in Germany and payments in Germany.
Kilian Thalhammer and Maik Klotz
Kilian Thalhammer and Maik Klotz are the two names people type next to "payment and banking" in a search box. Thalhammer has worked on the bank side, at Deutsche Bank among others, and brings the corporate payments view to the podcast. Klotz comes from the merchant and retail side and is the person the imprint names as responsible for the content. Both are on stage at the group's conferences and in the podcast feed.
They are not alone. André M. Bajorat, Jochen Siegert, Rafael Otero and Miriam Wohlfarth are the other shareholders. Sascha Dewald and Maik Klotz host the AI in Finance episodes, and the monthly fintech review is Bajorat and Siegert talking through the month.
The podcast
The Payment & Banking podcast archive goes back eleven years, which the site advertises as "11 Jahre P&B-Podcasts". It is several shows, not one. The main feed carries the people who run German payments: the head of EURO Kartensysteme on bringing the girocard into a digital checkout, the Germany lead of Mastercard on what happens to trust once an AI agent prepares the payment, a lawyer from Annerton on where an AI provider stops being a technical helper and becomes a regulated payment service.
AI in Finance is the weekly show on AI in the sector. Schnittstelle, built out of the earlier shows 3x3=10 and Talk Between the Towers, takes banking subjects such as occupational pensions and inheritance. How I Got Into Fintech asks people how they landed in the industry. Episodes are in German, and the agentic payments series is the closest the German market has to a public record of that debate.
Payment Exchange and Banking Exchange
Four formats belong to the group. Payment Exchange, short PEX, is the payments conference in Berlin, held in late winter. Banking Exchange, short BEX, takes the banking and payments questions to Frankfurt in November. KI Exchange covers AI in the financial sector, and Fintech des Jahres is the group's own award.
Both Exchanges call themselves boutique events with an edutainment approach. In practice that means one or two days, a few hundred people who mostly know each other, a stage program with jokes in it, and an afterparty. The ticket price separates bankers from providers, so the room is not a trade fair floor.
Where German payments teams meet besides these formats
Frankfurt holds the institutions. The ECB, the Bundesbank and the Anti-Money Laundering Authority sit there, which gives payments in Frankfurt a different crowd from payments in Berlin, where the product and startup side concentrates. Finanzplatz Frankfurt am Main, an information portal of a private publisher, follows the institutions, and BTC-ECHO covers the crypto end of the same market.
Finance Loop runs its own meetups and conferences on payments, instant transfers, card payments and the digital euro, in Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich and Hamburg. The two calendars rarely collide, and a payments professional in Germany tends to be in both.
Who is behind Payment & Banking?
PBA Experts GmbH in Munich publishes Payment & Banking. Nicole Nitsche is the managing director and Maik Klotz is named as responsible for the content. The imprint lists the shareholders as André M. Bajorat, Maik Klotz, Jochen Siegert, Kilian Thalhammer, Rafael Otero and Miriam Wohlfarth.
Is the Payment & Banking podcast in German?
Yes, the episodes are in German, and so is the site, with the occasional English guest article. A reader who wants the German payments market explained in English will find more of it on the pages of this site.
Payment & Banking and Finance Loop
Finance Loop reads Payment & Banking like everyone else in German payments, and its members speak at the same conferences. Finance Loop is the meeting place for payments in Germany, with the meetups in Frankfurt and Berlin, the conferences on instant transfers and the digital euro, and the event calendar that holds the dates. Finance Loop brings the people who build payment products together with the banks, supervisors and merchants who have to live with them.
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, Digital Infrastructure & Sovereignty, and Risk & Compliance.