Payment Exchange: the Berlin conference of the German payments industry
Payment Exchange, short PEX, is the payments conference of Payment & Banking, held in Berlin in late winter. The organizer states on payment-exchange.com that PEX 27 runs on February 23 and 24, 2027 under the motto "Orient PEXpress", and that "Payment Exchange ist eine Veranstaltung von Payment & Banking". Two days, a stage program, a live blog and an evening that most attendees plan their February around.
PEX is where the German payments year opens. Whatever the European Payments Council decided over the winter, whatever BaFin wrote to the institutions, whatever the card schemes announced for the coming season: it gets argued out on this stage before it reaches a bank's roadmap. The conference has run in Berlin since 2017 and has kept the format of a few hundred people who largely know each other.
What the program covers
Payment Exchange takes the subjects a payments team has to decide about in the coming year. Across editions that has meant payment infrastructure, digital identity, open banking access, instant transfers and artificial intelligence in the payment flow. The agenda follows what is actually binding: a regulation with a deadline, a scheme rulebook that changes the message format, a card scheme fee that moves.
The format puts speakers on stage who carry the decision inside their own house. Payment & Banking sells the Exchanges as boutique events with an edutainment approach, so the talks are short, the panels are argumentative, and the ticket price separates the bank side from the provider side so the room is not a trade fair floor. The subjects themselves sit on the Finance Loop pages for instant payments in Europe, open banking in Germany and card payments in Germany.
Who the program speaks to
PEX addresses the people who run a payment product or a payment process: product owners at banks and payment institutions, payment managers on the merchant side, the regulatory lawyers who tell them what is allowed, and the providers who sell into all of them. The German market is small enough that these groups meet each other repeatedly, which is the point of the event.
Anyone new to the field gets more from the ground-level pages first. Payments in Germany explains who runs the rails and who supervises them, and payments in Europe puts the German picture into the European one.
The Berlin payments calendar around it
Berlin carries the product and startup side of German payments, which payments in Berlin and fintech in Berlin set out. Finance Loop runs its own Berlin formats through the year, among them Europe's biggest fintech afterwork party, and the event calendar carries the dates.
The other half of the Payment & Banking year sits in Frankfurt. Banking Exchange takes the banking questions to the city of the ECB and the Bundesbank in November, so a payments professional in Germany usually attends both.
When is Payment Exchange 2027?
PEX 27 runs on February 23 and 24, 2027, as payment-exchange.com states it, with the motto "Orient PEXpress". The organizer publishes the venue, the program and the tickets on that site. Earlier editions were held at Tipi am Kanzleramt in Berlin.
Who organizes Payment Exchange?
Payment & Banking organizes Payment Exchange, as the conference site says in its own footer. Payment & Banking is the German media company for fintech, payments and digital banking, published by PBA Experts GmbH in Munich. The same group runs Banking Exchange, KI Exchange and the Fintech des Jahres award.
Payment Exchange and Finance Loop
Finance Loop has members in the room at Payment Exchange, on stage and in the audience. Finance Loop is the meeting place for payments in Germany between the two Exchanges, with its own Berlin and Frankfurt formats on instant transfers, card payments, open banking and the digital euro. Finance Loop keeps the dates in its event calendar.
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.