Fintech CTO for funded startups in Frankfurt

What a fintech CTO does before the first bank signs

A fintech CTO answers for the technology of the product and for the answers that a bank’s IT, compliance and procurement teams want before a contract. At seed and Series A the CTO is also the person in the sales meeting who explains how the product calculates and delivers its data.

Frankfurt is Germany’s banking center, and fintechs from abroad come to meet the banks there. In May 2025 the TechQuartier accelerator for digital finance started with 15 startups from seed to Series A, from Germany, Ukraine, Sweden, France, Luxembourg, Israel and the United States (TechQuartier, 2025-05-28). A startup like these needs its technology ready for a bank’s review, and someone in Frankfurt who has been through one.

Questions a bank asks a fintech, and where I dealt with them

A bank reviews a fintech before it uses the product. The left column lists what such a review covers in my experience. The right column names the work at the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital and before, where I dealt with the question myself.

What the bank wants to know	Where I dealt with it
What exactly do we receive, and at what price?	Service and price definitions of a market data product, 2023
May we use it commercially, and who owns what?	Terms and conditions and usage license agreements for the company’s intellectual property, 2023
How are the values calculated?	The market data manifest and the methodologies of the API endpoints, 2023
Which values were left out, and why?	An outlier detection that flags trade prices that deviate, in the product of 2022
What happens when a data center fails?	Infrastructure moved from Azure to another cloud provider, with a failover site
Who notices an error first?	Monitoring with log evaluation and notifications in the event of an error
Where is personal data kept, and under which rules?	GDPR measures documented and implemented; insurance portals run in the AWS regions Frankfurt and London from 2018
How does a partner connect and earn?	Agreements with an oracle network, a crypto exchange, banks and stock exchanges, and the legal framework of a partner program

A payments or insurance product needs other documents, and the questions stay much the same. Bring your answers to our call, including the missing ones.

My roles, newest first

• Since April 2026: AI engineer in a client’s platform transformation. Claude and Codex work in the repository under the same rules as the human developers. Details: AI agents under the same rules as humans.
• 2022 to October 2024: at Blocksize Capital, Head of Decentralized Finance and Node Operations, then Chief Information Officer from January 2023, with procuration from May 2023. In summer 2022 I wrote the concept of the market data product in the table, led its rollout and onboarded institutional customers with their cooperation partners. Details: Real-time market data for digital assets.
• 2016 to December 2021: Project Manager and Web Developer at Policen Direkt in Frankfurt, in the secondary market for life insurance. For the life insurance portals I worked directly with the chief actuary.

The stations between and before are on Career stages.

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke, and I live in Frankfurt. In spring 2022 I started the Frankfurt Blockchain Meetup with three colleagues. Its events took place at TechQuartier, with talks by Blockdaemon, DZ Bank, Chainlink and Bitwise, among others. I build software with Claude and Codex, and I am interested in open-source AI models that a company runs on its own servers. I work in German and English. Details: Frankfurt Blockchain Meetup.