At the University of Nicosia, Exness CMO Alfonso Cardalda Turns Marketing Lecture into a Modern Strategy Masterclass

On an otherwise ordinary weekday afternoon, the lecture hall at the University of Nicosia pulsed with the buzz of anticipation. Marketing students crowded the amphitheater, notebooks open, waiting for a guest who has steered one of the world’s leading fintech brands — Exness — and whose career spans global giants and hard-won successes few can claim. When Alfonso Cardalda, Chief Marketing Officer of Exness, stepped inside, the room straightened into attention.

What followed was less a lecture and more a tour through the engine room of contemporary marketing, equal parts philosophy, strategy, and lived experience from the front lines of a global fintech powerhouse.

Demystifying the Art — and Discipline — of Marketing

Cardalda opened with a provocation: Marketing is not just nice content; it’s a way of thinking.

From there, he guided students through the systems and structures behind Exness’s growth, distilling years of strategic practice into accessible insights. Using real companies and real campaigns as case studies, he stripped away the polished veneer that textbooks often provide and replaced it with something more honest: the messy, iterative, data-driven reality of modern brand building.

He broke down Exness’s internal methodology for crafting a successful campaign — from opportunity identification and hypothesis-building to execution, measurement, and optimization. Strategy, he emphasized, is not an abstract artifact but a process of constant calibration, anchored in KPIs and sharpened by analytical rigor.

A Conversation, Not a Speech

If his content was rich, the format was unexpectedly democratic. Rather than delivering a monologue, Cardalda invited students to interrogate, challenge, and interpret. Questions flowed freely, not only about marketing frameworks but about his personal journey, how a career that began in professional poker eventually led to orchestrating global marketing efforts for one of the fintech industry’s most recognizable brands.

His answers balanced candor with encouragement. He highlighted the skills he believes define a modern marketer:

• Analytical accuracy — the ability to read data well enough to predict behavior.
• Strategic consistency — thinking with KPIs in mind, always tethering creativity to business impact.
• Creative resilience — the courage to imagine differently but execute pragmatically.
• Cross-functional fluency — understanding how marketing touches product, technology, and customer experience.

Students later described the session as “unexpectedly interactive,” “shockingly real,” and “the closest thing to watching a strategist think aloud.”

A Lesson in Creativity with Accountability

Throughout the presentation, Cardalda kept returning to a central theme: creativity is essential, but creativity without implementation is just decoration. The best ideas, he argued, are the ones that survive the constraints of budget, timing, and user behavior, and still manage to move people.

He illustrated how Exness strikes this balance internally: pairing experimental thinking with rigorous A/B testing, aligning campaigns with measurable outcomes, and empowering marketers to question assumptions rather than inherit them.

A Company Reaching Toward Future Talent

The event is part of a broader Exness initiative to engage with young talent across Cyprus and beyond. As fintech continues to outpace traditional career paths, the company has taken a more active role in preparing students for the realities of a fast-moving digital economy.

“We don’t just hire talent,” one Exness representative said after the session. “We feel a responsibility to help form it.”

For the students at the University of Nicosia, the afternoon offered something rare: an unfiltered view into how strategy is built at scale, and a reminder that marketing, at its best, is both an art and a discipline. And for Cardalda, whose own journey began with similar curiosity, the visit seemed to close a circle, passing forward the lessons that shaped him.

When the session ended, a line of students formed to ask questions that didn’t make it into the Q&A. Cardalda stayed until the last one finished.

If the goal was to bring industry and academia closer, this felt like a step in the right direction, an intersection where ambition meets experience, and where the next generation of marketers begins to imagine its place.