FinTech FFM Meetups, the fintech meetup group of Frankfurt

The format is short and fixed. Two or three speakers give brief talks on a fintech topic, then three fintechs pitch. The group asks pitchers to skip the usual slides full of text, so founders explain their product in their own words. After the pitches, the room turns into an open networking session.

The audience mixes founders, bank staff, consultants and investors. For a founder, the evening is a cheap test of a pitch in front of people who know the market. For someone from a bank, it shows which problems young companies in Frankfurt work on right now, from payments to tokenized capital markets.

Most pitches at a fintech meetup in Frankfurt touch a license question. A company that moves customer money needs a license as a payment institution or e-money institution from BaFin under the Zahlungsdiensteaufsichtsgesetz (ZAG), the German law that implements the EU payment services directive PSD2. PSD2 also created the access rights behind open banking: licensed providers may read account data and start payments with the customer's consent.

Tokenization pitches rest on two other texts. The Electronic Securities Act (eWpG) lets issuers in Germany create bonds and some fund units as entries in an electronic register, including a crypto securities register on a blockchain. Crypto services fall under MiCA. The pages on fintech in Frankfurt, payments in Frankfurt and tokenization in Germany explain the field, and the hub answers on open banking and tokenized securities define the terms.

FinTech FFM Meetups is an event and network partner of Finance Loop. It supported TechClub 25/3, the fintech and blockchain afterwork party that Finance Loop organized with TechQuartier on the evening of March 25, 2025, as listed on the event post. For the Web3 Builders Ideathon in Frankfurt, the first ten applicants from Finance Loop and from FinTech FFM Meetups who matched the target audience got a guaranteed place.

FinTech FFM is the short name of the Meetup.com group "FinTech in and around Frankfurt". FFM is the common abbreviation for Frankfurt am Main. The group runs free-format evenings with talks and fintech pitches every six to eight weeks.

FinTech FFM Meetups often meets at TechQuartier, which hosts many of the city's fintech meetups. Frankfurt Data Science covers data and AI, and AI Hub Frankfurt runs AI Week Frankfurt. Finance Loop lists its own meetups and partner events on the meetups page and in its events overview. The pages on fintech in Europe, banking as a service in Germany and neobanks in Germany also point to FinTech FFM for meetups on their topics.

A fintech is a company that uses software to offer or support financial services such as payments, lending, investing or insurance. Whether it counts as a financial institution depends on what it does. A fintech that moves customer money or grants loans needs a BaFin license and is supervised like other institutions. A fintech that only sells software to banks needs no license, but its bank customers must manage it as an ICT third-party provider under DORA.

Fintechs from Frankfurt and the wider region pitch at the meetups, three per evening. Requests go through the organizers on Meetup.com, where the group also posts each date with its venue and program.