VÖB

The 64 members of VÖB are ordinary, extraordinary and associated members, and twelve of them are directly supervised by the European Central Bank. Members include BayernLB, LBBW, NRW.BANK, KfW, the securities services bank dwpbank and DekaBank. Aareal Bank, apoBank and DZ BANK belong to the association as extraordinary members, and Boerse Stuttgart is an associated member.

The member banks of VÖB grant more than 32 percent of corporate loans in Germany and more than 66 percent of the loans to the federal government, the states and the municipalities. More than half of the green bond volume that banks in Germany have issued since 2019 comes from VÖB members. Together with four other associations, VÖB forms Die Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft, the joint voice of the German banking industry.

Thomas Groß, CEO of Helaba, is president of VÖB, and Erk Westermann-Lammers, CEO of Investitionsbank Schleswig-Holstein, is vice president. The executive board also includes the heads of NORD/LB, LBBW, NRW.BANK, Landwirtschaftliche Rentenbank, DekaBank, SaarLB, L-Bank, BayernLB and KfW, as well as Ulrich Reuter, president of the German Savings Banks Association.

Iris Bethge-Krauß leads the head office as chief executive and executive board member, and her contract runs until 2032. Dominik Lamminger and Christoph Wengler are members of the executive management, with Hagen Christmann and Alexander Skorobogatov as deputy members.

VÖB is the only association of the German banking industry that also acts as employers association for its members, and it advises them on labor law and social security. Within VÖB, the Tarifgemeinschaft Öffentlicher Banken negotiates collective agreements for 48 member institutions with more than 65,000 employees, among them Landesbanken, development banks, building societies and some savings banks.

This bargaining group has existed since 1954 and negotiated jointly with the employers association of the private banks between 1972 and 2020. Since 2020 the public banks have negotiated their collective agreements on their own again.

In a 2025 position paper on a scalable DLT-based financial market in Europe, VÖB names four gaps: access to central bank money on DLT, the use of DLT-based securities as collateral in Eurosystem monetary policy, the Basel capital rules for crypto assets and the limits of the DLT Pilot Regime. VÖB also wants the Eurosystem settlement project Pontes open to a wider range of participants from 2028.

When the German and French finance ministries set up a task force on digital financial markets in June 2026, VÖB asked the Eurosystem to accept tokenized securities held outside central securities depositories as collateral. In the same statement, VÖB asked that future digital market infrastructure come from private providers in competition, without monopolies.

VÖB-Service GmbH has been a wholly owned subsidiary of VÖB since 1991 and sells consulting, banking software and training to banks, municipalities and the real estate industry. About 100 employees work for the company in Bonn and Berlin, and its Academy of Finance trains specialists and managers of the banking industry. The VÖB-Service-Kongress brought about 350 people from the banking industry to Bonn in September 2026.

VÖB-ZVD Processing GmbH is the competence center of VÖB for chip-based, card-based and other electronic payment applications.

Credit institutions under public law can protect their deposits on a voluntary basis through the deposit protection fund of VÖB. The association also runs a consumer arbitration board, which settles disputes between customers and member banks about financial services out of court.

The head office of VÖB is at Lennéstraße 11 in 10785 Berlin, a short walk from Potsdamer Platz. Since 1993 the association has also had an office in Brussels at Avenue de la Joyeuse Entrée 1-5, which keeps contact with the European Banking Authority and the European Securities and Markets Authority.

VÖB is accredited with the German Bundestag, the European Parliament and the European Commission. The association is a member of the European Association of Public Banks (EAPB) and an extraordinary member of the European Banking Federation. In June 2026 VÖB and Investitionsbank Berlin hosted the general assembly of the EAPB in Berlin, which elected Gabriela Pantring, CEO of NRW.BANK, as its president.