With approximately 6,300 employees and two headquarters in Frankfurt and Erfurt, the bank maintains branches in Düsseldorf and Kassel as well as offices in Berlin, Stuttgart, Munich and Muenster.

On an international level, Helaba acts through branches and representative offices in Paris, London, New York, Madrid, Moscow, Shanghai, and Singapore.

Frankfurter Sparkasse, the leading retail bank in the Rhine-Main region, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Helaba.

During his time in office, CEO Hans-Dieter Brenner later advocated a merger of Helaba with DekaBank, the fund manager for the country's savings banks.

[6] In July 2011 it was reported that Helaba would pull out of the EU's bank stress tests to avoid public failure.

In 2023, the European Central Bank fined Helaba with 6.83 million euro ($7.29 million) for "consciously" misrepresenting its exposure to turbulent financial markets during the COVID-19 pandemic so it would need less capital; at the time, this was the second-largest levied by the ECB since taking over supervision of the euro zone's biggest lenders in 2014.

[8] Helaba arranged the pre-letting quota of residences as a so-called “suitable financier” so that construction of the Hamburg Elbtower could proceed.