Piliavsky: Brokers' Growth Isn't Elsewhere — It's in Their CRM

Alex Piliavsky will take part in the panel "Your Broker's Growth Is Elsewhere: Ahead of 2027" on November 24, on the Craft Stage at Old Billingsgate. His planned case is that the opposite is true. Piliavsky started out at Seperia, later took senior marketing roles — several at C-level — at healthtech and fintech companies, and then co-founded Alchemy Avenue, a lifecycle marketing agency in Nicosia. He offered a preview of his remarks.

The panel's view is that growth sits elsewhere. In your reading, it is already built into the broker?

That's right. The brokers have already footed the bill. Each registration, each verified account, each trader who made a single deposit and then drifted away is still in their CRM. Most of them do not press that lemon hard enough. To be honest, a good number also don't know how to do it. They lack a clear strategy, the proper sequences, and the means to run them. So the automatic fallback is to buy more traffic.

Your approach is built around trader psychology. What does that look like in practice?

It starts from how people genuinely behave rather than from a campaign calendar. For traders, as for everyone else, attention spans are short these days. A message has only a few seconds to convince someone it is worth reading. So each step in a sequence should have one task: to move the reader one step ahead, using as few words as possible, at the point when action is most likely.

What a trader needs also shifts as they move along. A person who has just signed up is curious but uncertain. After closing a first trade, the trader wants confirmation they did it correctly. For a month-long absence, a reason to return is required, and being told the account is still there won't provide one.

What role does personalization play?

That is where the psychology becomes practical. A first name in the subject line is not personalization. It is a message that responds to the trader's own actions: the instruments they trade, their typical login hours, the point at which they went no further. A gold-focused trader should not receive a EUR/USD pitch. For most brokers, the CRM and trading platform already contain this data. It seldom reaches the messaging, though.

Where does gamification fit?

Trading is competitive at its core, and people react well to progress and a little luck. Onboarding is more effective when presented as a set of steps with visible progress, making completion feel like forward motion. Raffles provide a recurring reason to check in, which is often precisely what a trader idle for a month needs. Trading tournaments appeal to active traders, since a leaderboard gives an ordinary session a stake to play for. The same principle behind short messages explains why all these approaches work. The aim is obvious, and the next move is always in view.

What should brokers do ahead of planning for 2027?

Line up the metrics next to one another: registrations, verified accounts, first deposits, second deposits, active traders. The first two conversion drops are followed closely by most brokers. The stages after the first deposit receive far less scrutiny, and that is where the most value is concentrated. At each point of attrition, the exercise is to consider what would carry more clients to the next step. That comes down to which message, what timing, which channel, and which mechanic to use. The work lies in answering those questions, and it is what has been done with many brokers, advancing one conversion step at a time. The growth, in Piliavsky's view, already sits inside their systems. That lemon is already within reach; most brokers have simply not done so.

Piliavsky will deliver the talk "Your Broker's Growth Is Elsewhere: Ahead of 2027" on November 24, running from 11:20 to 11:50 a.m., on the Craft Stage at Old Billingsgate. He and Ohad Galitz, his fellow Alchemy Avenue co-founder, will both attend the summit.