Frankfurt am Main is the most international city situated in Germany, the biggest financial centre on the continent, the historical city of coronations, the city of Goethe and the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. The financial centre of Frankfurt is crucially important for the economic strength of the state, for preserving and generating new and superior qualified jobs, for the quality of the city and generally for ensuring the entire region’s ability to survive into the Future.
Frankfurt is the financial centre of Europe’s largest economy. It is home to most of the players in the financial sector, such as banks, insurance and investment companies. They are joined by Deutsche Börse and other institutions like the European Central Bank and Deutsche Bundesbank. Frankfurt is the centre of the FrankfurtRhineMain region where 5.3 million inhabitants live. 320,000 companies and a workforce of 2.7 million people produce an annual GDP of 180.2 billion euro. In this productive environment with its international mix of industries, companies of all sizes flourish, from big industrial groups to small software developers.Frankfurt is the richest city in Europe by GDP per capita.
Financial Background
After competing with several cities, Frankfurt has emerged victorious as the pre-eminent financial centre, triggered by the “historical event” of setting up the German Central Bank in Frankfurt.It houses the European Central Bank, the German Federal Bank, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the Frankfurt Trade Fair, as well as several large commercial banks.Banking is one of the primary sectors of industry in the German economy. It accounts for 3.2% of gross value added (as of 2003).
The Federal Republic has by far the largest banking sector compared with the rest of Europe and also boasts a disproportionately large insurance sector, with some 700 insurance companies operating in the market.With the stock Exchange (Frankfurter Wertpapierbörse) and XETRA, which belong to Deutsche Börse, Frankfurt has the second largest stock Exchange in Europe only after the London Stock Exchange. It is by far the largest stock Exchange in Germany with over 90 percent turnover in the German market. Deutsche Börse is the largest stock Exchange in the world in terms of market capitalization,
More than 23,000 people from the region work at 360 insurance companies. The Chamber of Commerce district of Frankfurt am Main alone has130 insurance companies, of which 92 are German and 38 foreign. Six reinsurance companies maintain their registered offices in the region (DBV-Winterthur, R+V Versicherung, Zürich Beteiligungs-Aktiengesellschaft, Mannheimer Aktiengesellschaft Holding, Delta Lloyd Rückversicherung, Incura AG.).
The Committee of European Insurance and Occupational Pension Supervisors (CEIOPS)’s headquarters is in Frankfurt am Main.
Frankfurt has the highest concentration of home owners in Germany. This is partly attributed to number of financial workers in the city but also because of its cosmopolitan nature with a quarter of the city’s population being foreigners. For this reason Frankfurt’s property market often functions differently than the rest of the country where the prices are generally much flatter than Frankfurt. German property prices are pulled down nationally because of the former East Germany, however, economically sound cities like Frankfurt and other cities in the west of Germany, have a buoyant housing market, which attracts a lot of buyers from the Far East.