During the Finance Magnates Africa Summit 2025, Angelos Gregoriou, the CEO and co-founder of Dynamic Works Syntellicore, took the stage to deliver valuable insight amid the current hype cycle around artificial intelligence.

“Everything is changing because of AI, but not everything is AI,” Gregoriou said in an interview dubbed “The Intelligent Future of Financial Services: AI, Automation &Brokerage Innovation,” that was hosted by Ivan Rojas, International Sales Director at Nelogica.

Gregoriou, whose firm provides the widely used Syntellicore, a CRM system for brokers, offered a candid and at times cautionary assessment of how AI is reshaping the brokerage business, while pushing back on the notion that technology can—or should—replace the human element that drives trust, conversion, and retention in financial services.

“So we're trying to eliminate onboarding time for brokers to zero by utilizing our own KYC online system, backed up with AI,” Gregoriou explained. “And this goes on mobile devices and the mobile applications that we built, or mobile applications that are built by others, or other brokers and developers.”

The Drive Toward Intelligent Automation

Dynamic Works, which counts a growing base of brokers in Africa and globally, has embedded AI into several layers of its CRM infrastructure. Gregoriou detailed how the firm is using AI to eliminate bottlenecks in onboarding, personalize marketing efforts, detect fraud, and conduct predictive client analysis—all in real time.

“AI comes to optimize their tools for marketing, to optimize their costs, and improve the quality of their communication with clients either through marketing or through sales channels, and to optimize the quality of the clients as well to know exactly which ones of your clients are important, valuable for you, and will bring value to the business,” he shared.

One key development is the company's in-house mobile Know Your Customer (KYC) tool, which leverages AI to drastically reduce onboarding times. Another: AI-powered voice analysis to assess the quality of client-broker interactions.

“In Africa, what we have seen compared to other regions is that there are more people, lower deposits. So yes, there is volume compared to anything else. So for us, because we are also of the relationships we have with all the brokers, mainly the main local brokers, and of course, the volume of clients is a very important aspect, and for us as a CRM provider, it is a very big opportunity.” While these tools are gaining traction, Gregoriou emphasized that AI should be used to complement—not replace—the human connection.

The Marketing Paradox

The session moderator pointed out a familiar paradox: brokers often lavishly spend on marketing while balking at technology investments. Gregoriou's response was clear: AI is the connective tissue that binds marketing, sales, and operations, and it delivers return on investment through optimization.

“AI can show you which of your leads are actually valuable,” he explained. “It doesn't just reduce costs—it improves quality.”

As for client demand, brokers are increasingly requesting advanced tools that can deliver such intelligence. The firm is now investing in proprietary AI models trained on internal knowledge bases to offer faster, self-taught customer support—a critical component for scaling operations.

Africa as a Data Frontier

The discussion also turned to the unique opportunity AI presents in emerging markets. In Africa, Gregoriou said, the combination of high trading volume and small deposits creates a data-rich environment for training machine learning models—and for refining product-market fit.

“Already launched is the AI analysis of the voice calls. So during this process we listen to a lot of calls between that happen between the brokers and the clients,” he said. “So we ask for our clients for prototyping to give us, voice calls to analyze them and extract uh translate them with our tools extract the benchmarks and the harmonies of the calls.”

“During that process, we learned a lot about the communication between the broker and the client that maybe we couldn't realize,” Gregoriou explained.

More from the FMAS:25: “If You Take Off Your Logo and Put in Competitor’s and It Works, You Failed”: Marketing Strategies from FMAS:25

Asked whether a fully AI-operated broker—one with minimal headcount—was on the horizon, Gregoriou was skeptical. “Many ask me: when can AI agents start calling clients?” he said. “But this isn't about replacing people. It's about making them more effective.”

He rejected the notion of a “one-agent broker,” saying the industry is too fragmented, regionalized, and relationship-driven for such a model to work, especially in client acquisition and retention.

AI Realism Over AI Rhetoric

Gregoriou concluded the session with a pointed warning to attendees: don't fall for buzzwords. “Be careful with preachers claiming to have the solution for everything,” he said, referencing so-called AI tools that offer little more than automation in disguise.

Instead, he urged firms to invest wisely, test rigorously, and remember that at the heart of every trade there is still a person—one who needs to be heard.

Source: Finance Magnates