“Networks, talent, investors – a fintech ecosystem thrives on an active startup scene, cooperative partners from the financial industry, investors and a large network of service providers for regulatory and other legal issues. The financial center of Frankfurt offers such an environment and thus has particularly good conditions for fintechs,” said Hesse’s Finance Minister Michael Boddenberg during a discussion with founders of the fintechs Cashlink, vc trade, ESG Book and komuno at the offices of Helaba Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen in Frankfurt. As a major partner, Helaba Digital is participating in the fintechs – also to expand its own portfolio of offerings in the market.
“SMEs in Hesse also benefit from the strategic further development of the Helaba Group into digital markets and business models. With its comprehensive portfolio of financing instruments, the Landesbank and its subsidiaries make a significant contribution to the supply of credit to regional companies. At the same time, it supports the fintech ecosystem in the financial center of Frankfurt – not least through its commitment to startups,” said the minister, who, together with Thomas Groß, CEO of Helaba, held discussions with the founders.
Thomas Groß added: “Shaping the digital transformation – at and for our customers as well as within the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe – is one of our most important strategic goals. Participation in relevant fintechs, especially in the area of the platform economy, plays a prominent role in this. We are convinced that customers of all sizes and from all sectors will increasingly use platforms in the future to meet their financing or investment needs. We are pleased to be able to contribute to the further development of the successful fintech ecosystem in the financial center through our investment portfolio.”
Cashlink
The fintech Cashlink has developed an infrastructure for the tokenization of assets and enables the completely digital issuance of securities such as bonds, certificates or profit participation rights with the help of blockchain technology. In addition to the technical infrastructure, the fintech also covers all necessary regulatory requirements. Apart from potential use cases in the field of tokenization, this also gives Helaba Group the opportunity to become part of a steadily growing ecosystem of the future.
vc trade
Digitizing the manual and highly fragmented process of loan transactions in corporate banking is the idea vc trade is dedicated to. vc trade is a fully integrated digital trading platform for structuring, marketing, syndication, settlement and lifecycle management of loan financing for corporates, banks and institutional investors. The platform, which combines the capabilities of a marketplace and a transaction infrastructure, is open to all market participants and aims to accelerate, simplify and make existing processes more efficient for the first time in a unified digital infrastructure. In addition to transparency, increased efficiency and cost benefits, vc trade also offers new services for all transaction participants, such as a paperless documentation process that enables legally compliant transaction processing, online document collaboration and a direct feed of information into core banking systems. More than 1000 banks, corporates and institutional investors worldwide use vc trade in the context of credit transactions.
komuno
With over 550 municipal customers and more than 100 lenders, around 2000 tenders and a tender volume of more than 18 billion euros, the digital municipal lending platform komuno has established itself on the German market. In addition to the successful marketplace for municipal financing, komuno has already implemented a digital application route for subsidies with a development bank and is cooperating with other market participants in the development of automated products and processes as well as the topic of sustainability in the public sector.
ESG Book
ESG Book is a leading provider of sustainability data and technologies, as well as ESG and climate solutions. Covering over 50,000 companies, ESG Book’s product offering includes raw ESG data, corporate and portfolio-level scores and ratings, analytical tools, and a software as a service (SaaS) platform for data management and disclosure. ESG Book’s platform provides access to more than 135,000 company data and makes sustainability data more available and comparable for market participants.
“With the universities in the Rhine-Main region and their focus on finance in Frankfurt and cybersecurity in Darmstadt, the TechQuartier initiated by the state of Hesse and the StartHub, the Rhine-Main region also offers a well-connected ecosystem for fintechs that is strong in funding,” Minister Boddenberg explained.
Source: Hessische Ministerium der Finanzen
Image: Helaba
