Head of Business Development for fintech in Germany

What a Head of Business Development does in a fintech

A Head of Business Development finds the partners and customers a fintech needs and takes each deal to a signed contract. Job ads for the title ask for a pipeline across inbound, outbound and strategic partnerships, deals led personally from the first conversation to the close, and experience in fintech, B2B software or payments. Many of the ads in Germany ask for German.

In finance a deal depends on the paperwork: banks and asset managers can use a product only when its terms pass their compliance checks. Much of my business development work was that paperwork and the talks that lead to it.

My business development work, newest first

• Since January 2026: Editor at Business Punk. I write about digital assets and crypto investing, regularly in the investment special Anlage Punk for readers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
• Since May 2024: expert member of the Product Advisory Committee of the Digital Token Identifier Foundation. My part is the adoption of the identifiers in Germany and other countries, through my network.
• 2022 to October 2024: at the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital, Head of Decentralized Finance and Node Operations, Chief Information Officer from January 2023, with procuration from May 2023. I spoke with decision-makers at stock exchanges and banks and onboarded institutional and professional customers with their cooperation partners.
• 2016 to December 2021: Project Manager and Web Developer at Policen Direkt, in the German secondary market for life insurance. Customers of the digital insurance manager ordered products of external partners in it, and I coordinated the work between marketing, management, product development and those partners.
• 2011 to 2016: Project Lead and Developer at Valentins (Burda Digital), the IT link between management and marketing. I connected the shops to PayPal, WorldPay and Amazon Pay.

Next to these positions I took part in several due diligences over ten years, and I have written business plans and pitched to investors and partners. Details: Publications, press and committees.

The partner pipeline of a data product, stage by stage

A deal with a bank or an exchange passes through several stages before the partner goes live. The table shows the stages for the market data product of 2022 and my part in each; the documents date from 2023.

Stage	My part
First talk	I spoke with decision-makers at stock exchanges, banks and other financial market participants.
Case for the product	I explained why institutional users need compliant market data as regulatory pressure grows.
Offer	I helped write the service and price definitions and the market data manifest.
Contract	I helped write the terms and conditions, worked on usage license agreements for the company’s intellectual property, and designed agreements with an oracle network, a crypto exchange, banks and stock exchanges.
Technical onboarding	I helped write the methodologies for the API endpoints and onboarded the institutional and professional customers with their cooperation partners.
Referral	I created the legal framework of the partner program, through which partners earn by recommending the company’s services to third parties.

The stages carry over to insurance and payments products; the documents change with the product and its regulator.

Profile at a glance

Role	Head of Business Development, partnerships, fintech and insurance
Engagement	Permanent, remote for the most part, on-site days in Frankfurt Rhine-Main and with partners in DACH; freelance; interim
Location	Frankfurt, Germany
Counterparts	Stock exchanges, banks, asset managers, an oracle network, a crypto exchange, technology providers
Documents	Terms and conditions, price definitions, partner program framework, license agreements, due diligences
Authority	Procuration at a Frankfurt fintech from May 2023
Languages	German, English

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke. I have worked in IT and media for more than twenty years, and since 2016 in the finance industry of Frankfurt: first at a company in the life insurance market, then at a fintech. As CIO, part of my job was to describe technically complex matters in simple words. Outside finance, I am interested in open-source AI models that a company runs on its own servers. Details: Career stages.