CIO and Interim Chief Information Officer in Germany

What a CIO does in your company

A Chief Information Officer (CIO) answers for the IT of a company at executive level: the IT budget, the IT teams, the providers and their contracts, security, and the plan for the systems the company will run in the coming years. The CIO sits with the management and reports to it.

An Interim Chief Information Officer holds the same seat for an agreed period, for example while the company searches for a permanent CIO, or as a trial before a permanent contract. In a smaller company the CIO often runs the IT operation as well.

Questions to ask a CIO candidate, with my answers

A company that hires a CIO wants to know what a candidate has answered for. These are the questions I would ask in your place, with my answer and the page that shows it.

Question	My answer	Page
Which budget have you answered for?	The IT budget of a Frankfurt fintech as CIO, January 2023 to October 2024, including cost cuts with my team	CIO and Head of DeFi at a Frankfurt fintech
Whom have you led?	Business-critical teams with disciplinary responsibility; as CIO I coordinated development, infrastructure, product and sales. My earlier leadership roles were IT Team Lead and Managing Director	Supporting people
Could you sign for the company?	Yes. From May 2023 I held procuration, which authorized me to represent the company in judicial and extrajudicial transactions	CIO and Head of DeFi at a Frankfurt fintech
Which contracts have you written?	In 2023 I helped write the terms and conditions, the service and price definitions and the API methodologies of a market data product, and I designed agreements with an oracle network, a crypto exchange, banks and stock exchanges	CIO and Head of DeFi at a Frankfurt fintech
Have you moved systems to another cloud?	Yes. I moved blockchain infrastructure from Azure to another cloud provider and set up a failover site	Node operations and a cloud migration with failover
How do you explain IT to people outside IT?	In simple words, with the decision it calls for. As CIO I explained to decision-makers at banks and stock exchanges why institutional users need compliant market data on digital assets	Real-time market data for digital assets
What may an AI agent do in the company?	What a new colleague may do on the first day: read and propose. At a client, the credentials of AI coding agents cannot push to the production branch	AI agents under the same rules as humans
Have you examined IT from outside?	Yes. In due diligences on the buyer’s and the seller’s side I examined the documents on the quality of IT systems and the state of teams	Publications, press and committees

My positions, newest first

• Since June 2026: Lecturer at Claude Hacker House in Frankfurt, on prompting, AI-assisted workflows, MCP servers and virtual organizations.
• Since April 2026: AI Engineer in Platform Transformation. With Claude and Codex I help a client break up a monolithic application; the work has produced more than 300 RESTful API endpoints and more than 8,000 commits.
• 2022 to October 2024: at the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital, Head of Decentralized Finance and Node Operations, then Chief Information Officer from January 2023, with procuration from May 2023. As CIO I held the budgets and the management of information technology, and I carried the product vision through to the launch of financial products. Growth and marketing were part of the position.
• 2016 to December 2021: Project Manager and Web Developer at Policen Direkt, with the customer portal, the group’s websites and its AWS setup in Frankfurt and London. By December 2021 I had managed more than 100 top-level domains for the group.

Details: Career stages.

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke, and I live in Frankfurt. I lead with empathy: I learn who does what best with whom, and in a crisis I bring in the people from my network who can help. I work in German and English. I hold a training authorization from IHK Frankfurt for two IT apprenticeships, and I sit on the Product Advisory Committee of the Digital Token Identifier Foundation, the registration authority for ISO 24165. Details: Publications, press and committees.