It’s a European city located on a medium-sized river with an 800-year tradition of financial innovation. Once the monetary metropole of a vast empire, today it has alpha+ global status, a stock exchange of worldwide importance, and several system-critical banks. For centuries, it has played a key role in the dissemination of the written word and remains a cultural centre of the first order. And no, it’s not London.

If you don't immediately associate Frankfurt with this description, you are not alone. To many in the English-speaking world (and no small number in the German-speaking countries), Frankfurt is seen as little more than a second-rank provincial city that owes its outsized finance industry to the misfortunes of Berlin following the post-war division of Germany. Even Frankfurters themselves have, on occasion, underestimated their home town: many in the city government of the early 1990s fully expected the banks and exchanges to be in Berlin by now.