Bundesverband deutscher Banken

[1] The BdB was founded in 1951 in Cologne as an Eingetragener Verein, succeeding the pre-war Centralverband des deutschen Bank- und Bankiergewerbes [de] (1901-1945), which was based in Berlin.

[10] The Auditing Association of German Banks (German: Prüfungsverband deutscher Banken e.V., PdB), established in 1969 in Cologne, is a sister entity to the BdB and is tasked with assessing the risk of each participating BdB member which feeds into the calculation of EdB and ESF deposit guarantee fees.

[11] The membership of the Prüfungsverband largely overlaps with that of the Bankenverband: as of early 2024, it included all Grossbanken and Privatbanken, all Regionalbanken except Westend Bank in Frankfurt, and nearly half of the Auslandsbanken.

[14] From 2016 until 2017, a parliamentary fact-finding committee probed BdB’s potential involvement in tax fraud involving multi-billion-euro trades to get bogus tax reclaims, following the revelations by the CumEx Files; however, the probe proved unable to access emails and documents from BdB.

In 2020, public prosecutors on raided the Berlin and Frankfurt offices of BdB as part of a similar investigation.