Fintech in Stuttgart

Stuttgart Financial (in German), the initiative for the city's financial center, counts 17 banks, 29 insurers, two building societies and one of the Big Four audit firms in Stuttgart, and 29,303 people employed in the city's financial sector in its 2016 count. With 11,250 insurance employees, Stuttgart is one of the six largest insurance locations in Germany and larger than Berlin or Frankfurt by that measure. LBBW, the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, is the largest German state bank.

The building societies are a Stuttgart specialty. Schwäbisch Hall, Badenia, LBS Südwest and Wüstenrot, the four building societies of Baden-Württemberg, hold 53 percent of net new business in Germany. In the Global Financial Centres Index published in March 2025, Stuttgart ranked 66th worldwide, 26th in Europe and 42nd in the fintech category.

Börse Stuttgart (in German) dates from 1861 and is the third largest German trading venue for equities after Xetra and Tradegate. Its Euwax segment is for structured derivatives. The Ministry of Economic Affairs of Baden-Württemberg supervises the exchange together with BaFin.

The exchange group moved into crypto early. It launched the Bison app in January 2019, the first crypto trading app in Europe with a traditional securities exchange behind it, and opened the crypto trading venue BSDEX in December 2019. Since 2023 the crypto business sits in Boerse Stuttgart Digital, whose offers about 1.2 million end customers used in 2025.

Stuttgart Financial and Börse Stuttgart started the fintech accelerator fintogether in November 2021. According to Start-up BW (in German), the first batch had six teams, more than 25 workshops, 30 mentors from partners such as SAP, EY and Amazon Web Services, and office space in the city center.

The program now runs as the Finance Accelerator (in German), backed by Stuttgart Financial and the Börse Stuttgart Group. It helps founders with funding at each stage: grants, business angels and crowdfunding early on, venture capital and corporate investors later, bonds or an IPO for mature companies. It reports more than 120 startups in its community and more than 66 partners.

A Stuttgart fintech needs the same licenses as one in Frankfurt or Berlin. BaFin licenses banks, payment institutions and investment firms, and a crypto firm applies to it for a license under MiCA. Exchange supervision is a state matter: for Börse Stuttgart, the ministry in Stuttgart carries it out.

A startup that sells to a Stuttgart insurer or building society meets two EU laws in the contract. DORA requires the customer to register and test its IT providers and to plan an exit. The EU AI Act classes AI for consumer credit scoring and for risk assessment and pricing in life and health insurance as high-risk, with duties on documentation and human oversight.

Finance Loop started in Frankfurt and holds events in Munich, Berlin and Hamburg as well; it has not held an event in Stuttgart so far. People from Stuttgart's banks, insurers, building societies and fintechs meet others from their field at these events, in the webinars and in the member network across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The exchange group has its own pages on this site, Boerse Stuttgart Digital and BSDEX, and the digital asset side of the city is on blockchain in Stuttgart.

Current Finance Loop meetups, webinars and partner conferences are on the events page.

Stuttgart Financial is the initiative for the Stuttgart financial center. The Ministry of Economic Affairs of Baden-Württemberg, the Stiftung Kreditwirtschaft at the University of Hohenheim and the association that runs Börse Stuttgart founded it in 2007. It publishes figures on the financial center, runs the Finance Accelerator and holds event formats from its Finance Summit to its Venture Day.

Stuttgart Financial runs its own formats, from the Finance Summit to the Venture Day. Invest (in German) at Messe Stuttgart, with Börse Stuttgart as co-organizer, is a fair for private investors; Stuttgart Financial calls it the largest event on finance topics in the German-speaking region. Finance Loop events run in Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Hamburg, with dates in the calendar above.

Yes. The Finance Accelerator of Stuttgart Financial and the Börse Stuttgart Group supports finance startups from setup to scale-up and also advises other founders on grants, business angels and venture capital. It started in 2021 under the name fintogether.