Frankfurt School of Finance and Management

History

The Frankfurt School of Finance & Management was founded 1957 as Bankakademie (Bank Academy), initially as a training institute for the employees of German banks. These continuing education programs remained the main focus for the first three decades. In the 1990s the pace of development accelerated. In 1989 the Bankakademie created its own publishing house, followed one year later by the foundation of the Hochschule für Bankwirtschaft (HfB), an academic institution offering degree programs. A consulting arm, International Advisory Services, was added in the 1990s as well, as was a separate department for Executive Education and tailor-made training programs for companies. Efiport, a subsidiary for e-learning and IT solutions for higher education, was created in 2001.

In 2004 HfB officially became a research institution with the rank of a university and was granted the right to award doctoral degrees. In 2007 HfB and Bankakademie were merged under the new name Frankfurt School of Finance & Management.

Accreditations

The Frankfurt School is officially recognised as a higher education institution with the rank of a university by the German authorities. As such, it has the right to award undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral degrees.

Since 2014 Frankfurt School is accredited by AACSB and EQUIS. Together with the ESMT Berlin, the University of Mannheim, and WHU Frankfurt School is one of four German business schools with both AACSB and EQUIS accreditations.

The School has also been accredited by the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) and by the FIBAA. The Master of Finance and the Bachelor of Science in Business Administration hold FIBAA's Premium Seal. Its MBA in International Healthcare Management is accredited by the EFMD.

Rankings

Over the last several years, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management has risen in several global business school rankings.

In 2017, Frankfurt School was ranked 1st in Germany, and 18th in Europe for employability in a study conducted by QS Intelligence and TopMBA.com, which surveyed 12,125 employers and HR professionals over a 5-year period.

Frankfurt School has been ranked among the top 100 universities in the world, and 1st in Germany, for management and strategy research output between 2014-17 according to The UTD Top 100 World Rankings of Business Schools.

It was ranked the fourth best Business School in Germany by business magazine Wirtschaftswoche in 2015, based on a survey of roughly 540 HR directors.

Frankfurt School's flagship program, the Master of Finance, was ranked 21st in the Financial Times ranking of Pre-Experience Masters in Finance in 2015 and was the only German program to be included. It has now featured in each of the last four FT rankings of the best Pre-Experience Masters in Finance programs globally.

In 2015, Frankfurt School's Executive MBA featured for the first time in the Financial Times Executive MBA Ranking. It was rated as one of the top 100 EMBAs in the world, debuting at 93rd. In the segment on top ten programs in selected categories of the same ranking, Frankfurt School was ranked 1st in Top for economics and 5th in Top for finance. In 2016, Frankfurt Schools' Executive MBA jumped to the 81st position in the global rankings.

Frankfurt School features at world number 67 (Germany number 6) in the Global University Employability University survey 2016 compiled by French human resources consulting group Emerging Associates along with German polling and research institute Trendence. The ranking is based on surveys of 2,500 international recruiters in 20 countries.

The German business newspaper Handelsblatt ranked Frankfurt School as 8th best business research university in Germany in 2012.

In a 2012 ranking of German undergraduate business programs by higher education think tank CHE, Frankfurt School was ranked best together with the University of Mannheim, the Technical University Munich, EBS, and WHU.

The 2011/12 international Eduniversal list of the 1,000 best Business Schools ranked Frankfurt School 3rd in Germany and 126th worldwide.

FS is ranked as 92nd in the world and 4th in Germany in the "Ranking Web of World Business Schools", an initiative of Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC).

Undergraduate

The School offers a full-time Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.). in Business Administration with a total of 210 ECTS credit points. The duration of the program is seven semesters (3.5 years), including one or two semesters abroad. There are currently eight different concentrations that vary by focus and language of instruction.

Fully taught in English:

Taught in German and English:

The School offers also a part-time Bachelor of Arts in German and English

Postgraduate

Frankfurt School offers nine postgraduate programs and awards the degrees Master of Science (M.Sc.), Master of Arts (M.A.), Master of Business Administration (MBA) and Master of Laws (LL.M.).

Doctoral Program

Frankfurt School also has a 4-year doctoral program which awards the degree Dr. rer. pol., the German equivalent to a PhD. The doctoral program offers concentrations in finance, management, and accounting for up to 10 students per year.

Faculty

The faculty at Frankfurt School is organized in five departments. In addition to the professors and lecturers there are eleven Program Directors who oversee and develop the degree programs. They are counted as faculty, although they form part of a different team that reports to the President rather than the Vice President for Academic Affairs and not all of them teach continuously.

Campus

The School's campus is located in Frankfurt, Germany in the district Ostend, directly opposite the construction site for the new headquarters of the European Central Bank. It also has rented office space in adjacent buildings. However, due to sustained growth the School will build a new, state of the art campus in Frankfurt's Nordend, which is slated to open in 2017.

Frankfurt School also has study centers in Hamburg and Munich and five offices around the world, mainly for recruitment of students and for activities related to its consulting and executive education: Nairobi, Beijing, Shanghai, Pune (India) and São Paulo.

Consulting

International Advisory Services (IAS) structures and implements consulting and training projects in emerging markets and developing countries. Clients include international donor organisations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), international financial institutions (IFIs), microfinance institutions (MFIs), banks and other financial institutions.

Experts of Frankfurt School of Finance & Management’s division International Advisory Services have supported partners and clients in the following areas:

IAS reaches its clients through seven core competence centers:

Subsidiaries

Frankfurt School has three subsidiaries: the publisher Frankfurt School Verlag; efiport, which specializes in IT solutions for higher education and Frankfurt School Financial Services, an asset management firm for development projects.

International partners

Frankfurt School is a very international Business School, partly due to the fact that all undergraduate students go abroad for at least one semester. Currently, there are 84 partner institutions in 33 countries. The School has two dual degree agreements for the Bachelor program International Business Administration with Bond University in Australia and with the University of Colorado Colorado Springs in the United States.

Notable people

In the last 50 years over 100,000 students have graduated from the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management and its predecessors Bankakademie and HfB. Many of them hold important positions in German and international companies, especially in financial institutions.