2026 Tekkie Award for Tech Visionary: Chase Larson, St. Cloud Financial Credit Union

By John San Filippo

Finopotamus is pleased to announce the winners of the 2026 Tekkie Awards, all of whom will be profiled individually throughout the month of August. In this installment of the series, we highlight Chase Larson, EVP/Chief Lending Officer at St. Cloud Financial Credit Union (SCFCU), who won the Tech Visionary Award. Open to any credit union tech professional who actively worked to advance technology for the credit union movement in 2025, this award recognizes leaders who share their knowledge through CUSO involvement, participation in industry conferences, collaborative research, or by spearheading open-source initiatives – technologists who understand that when one credit union innovates, the whole movement succeeds.

Is Chase Larson a lending executive who also has responsibilities in technology, or a technology executive who also has responsibilities in lending? According to Larson, the answer to that question continues to evolve. Although his official title is Chief Lending Officer, he is also spearheading an effort to keep the $456 million, 29,000 member St. Cloud Financial (Sartell, Minn.) ahead of the digital assets curve, which continues to reshape the financial services landscape. What’s more, Larson was specifically recruited to fill this unique dual role, he said.

A Strategic “Twofer”

For SCFCU, moving into digital assets wasn’t a sudden reaction to market speculation. According to President and CEO Jed Meyer, it was the outcome of a deliberate strategic discipline established years ago.

“As a 97-year-old credit union that has scaled from $100 million to $450 million in the last dozen years, we watch consumer behavior as well as look for areas where we have a competitive advantage over all of our competitors in our community,” Meyer told Finopotamus. “Human capital is our number one challenge, and actual capital is our second challenge. If my members ever demand something that we have done zero work on, we would need to drop all other strategies to have our human capital focus on that urgent need. Thus, at SCFCU we believe in doing the work to 20–40% before we have to or before it becomes material to us through member demand.”

That forward-thinking methodology led SCFCU’s leadership back in 2019 to identify several emerging long-term focus areas, including cannabis banking, a multicultural division, and digital assets. When the credit union was searching for a new chief lending officer, leadership recognized an opportunity to leverage what Larson calls a “twofer.”

“They had a chief lending position that they were looking to hire,” recalled Larson. “When the board and Jed were talking about how we need to do something around blockchain and digital assets, my name came up. They had strategically already decided that they were going to go try and recruit me for the CLO role – both given my lending experience, but mainly because they knew that I was known in our community as the crypto guy.”

Meyer confirmed that bringing Larson on board aligned perfectly with SCFCU’s long-term roadmap. “Chase is a rising star in the credit union industry and came to SCFCU right at the right time,” noted Meyer. “He is passionate, cares about helping people, and is an amazing CLO/EVP. Along with Jon Ungerland from DaLand CUSO, Chase has owned a crypto consulting company for years and is one of the brightest minds on this topic for our industry.”

Becoming the Community “Crypto Guy”

Larson’s path to becoming a digital asset strategist did not stem from a traditional computer science or economic degree. In fact, his formal education includes a two-year sales degree from a local community college and a bachelor’s degree in business management from Southwest Minnesota State. His deep expertise in decentralized finance grew out of personal curiosity, investment discipline, and hundreds of late-night hours of self-directed research.

“I’ve always been an investment guy – it’s actually how I paid my way through two degrees in college,” Larson explained. “In late 2015, early 2016, I personally went all-in. That led me into wanting to tell people about what I thought the future of money was going to be, and how decentralized networks were going to change banking.”

Over two years, Larson informally helped between 50 and 70 local community leaders – ranging from attorneys and accountants to bankers and family members – understand blockchain technology and properly configure cold-storage wallets. In a community of 60,000 people, word spread quickly.

“I was getting stopped in the grocery store: ‘Hey, are you Chase? You’re that crypto guy, right?’” He eventually formed a local consulting firm to deliver non-investment educational sessions for businesses and individuals, focusing on how decentralized networks function and how they would inevitably intersect with traditional finance.

As he spent years studying the space, Larson’s perspective evolved from viewing digital assets as an investment asset class to recognizing them as a foundational shift in global financial infrastructure.

“It really morphed over the years to: Oh my gosh, if community banks and credit unions don’t understand this, this is going to be the ‘Blockbuster Video’ moment for our industry,” Larson noted. “All we are in the most simplistic form is a centralized ledger that stores debits and credits, and our members trust that we’re going to keep an active account of their records. The Bitcoin blockchain alone has approximately 6,000 or more servers storing a record of every transaction. You no longer need a credit union or a centralized authority to trust the data or the record of money movement.”

Preserving the Cooperative Relationship

When credit unions initially began exploring digital assets, many turned to third-party turn-key vendors. Larson and the executive team at SCFCU, however, realized that outsourcing digital asset functionality meant shipping member relationships, member data, and digital liquidity out the door to external platforms.

To solve this issue, SCFCU partnered with DaLand CUSO to deploy the CU-Digital Asset Vault. Powered by DaLand’s Coin2Core framework, the Vault converts a traditional core processing system into a digital wallet layer. Instead of relying on a third-party bolt-on solution, digital asset transactions reconcile and post directly through the credit union’s existing core.

“Our core-centric strategy, built by DaLand CUSO, converts your modern core into an institutional-grade wallet with the most agility and the highest safety ratings in the world,” Meyer explained. “It brings compliance, accounting, redundancy, and disaster recovery, along with local service to our members, in these new emerging money networks. Our belief has always been that these new money networks would live side by side with the traditional virtual dollar and that we, as credit unions, should not outsource our member relationships to third parties.”

The architectural deployment achieves four major goals:

• Core Integration: Transactions post directly inside the core processing platform, maintaining complete balance sheet integrity and unified reporting.

• Hybrid Self-Custody: Members maintain ownership of their digital assets while the credit union supplies institutional governance and safeguards.

• Integrated Risk and Compliance: Full BSA/AML/KYC integration and board-level reporting operate natively within existing policy frameworks.

• Scalable Infrastructure: The stack accommodates future blockchain capabilities, including tokenized real estate, tokenized deposits, smart contracts, and programmatic payments.

Building on this framework, Larson helped guide SCFCU’s strategy for Cloud Dollar ($CLDUSD), one of the first credit union-issued stablecoins developed in partnership with Metallicus. However, Larson emphasized that stablecoins are merely one narrow application of blockchain infrastructure.

“RTP and FedNow are purely money movement, but there’s a host of other things you can do on a blockchain,” Larson replied when asked how this technology compares to more traditional instant payment networks. “We’ll see titles to real estate go on the blockchain, car titles get tokenized, and 401(k)s get tokenized. Having infrastructure allows us the ability to pull anything that lives on a blockchain into our core in the future.”

Larson also highlighted a crucial accounting distinction between stablecoins and tokenized deposits. “If I want to issue stablecoins, I’m required to lock up the corresponding amount of reserves in cash on my balance sheet,” he noted. “Tokenized deposits allow cash to convert directly without that same reserve constraint. Large institutions shifted their focus to tokenized deposits, and it’s important we educate credit unions so they aren’t left behind using limited frameworks.”

Production Results and Regulatory Validation

The results at SCFCU demonstrate that core-integrated digital assets are a practical, production-ready reality. Following a “friends and family” soft rollout in December 2025, SCFCU launched the CU-Digital Asset Vault to its broader membership in February 2026.

Within weeks, the rollout produced concrete results:

• 132 member wallets .

• 44 Digital Asset Vaults opened.

• Over 12 Bitcoin safeguarded, in addition to Ethereum and USDC holdings.

• 100% internal governance maintained without third-party custody providers or outsourced wallet platforms.

Perhaps most important, the architecture stood up to supervisory scrutiny, Larson explained. During routine examination discussions, regulators noted that they frequently encountered digital asset proposals that blurred the line between custody and insured deposits. SCFCU’s architecture provided clear audit visibility, explicitly separating custody mechanics from insured share balances while preserving board oversight.

“We have been holding off-balance-sheet Bitcoin, USDC, and Ethereum on our core system for over two years now,” Meyer noted. “Our staff and board are very comfortable and well-trained. Additionally, we have been audited, launched one of the first proprietary stablecoins with Cloud$, and with our legislation passed in Minnesota, we do not need to wait for national legislation to start advancing our digital asset strategies to all current use cases.”

The Urgency of Action and Collaborative Vision

Looking toward the future, Larson sees an urgent need for credit unions to act. The rapid convergence of decentralized finance and agentic AI will fundamentally alter how commerce is conducted.

“What keeps me up at night is the rapid consolidation of financial institutions over the next five years,” Larson said. “Our industry has never faced decentralized finance combined with agentic AI agents. AI agents are not going to settle in paper currency, and traditional financial rails are not set up to support autonomous agentic commerce. Blockchain, digital assets, and Bitcoin are. When decentralized finance meets AI, that is gas and fire on the impact it’s going to have.”

To help credit unions bridge the knowledge gap, Larson is chairing a newly formed national Digital Asset Task Force alongside former federal prosecutor for the US Department of Justice (DOJ) Amanda Wick. The collaborative initiative brings together credit union executives, regulators, compliance professionals, and technology experts to share research, establish educational frameworks, and build open avenues for institutional adoption.

“Getting off zero and taking deliberate action is critical,” Larson stressed. “Given the collaborative nature of the credit union industry, if we roll up our sleeves and work together for the future of our industry, we have a unique opportunity. Decentralized finance can bring our cooperative charter to the next level in the digital age.”

Meyer echoed that shared perspective. “When we hired Chase to come on to help us build this strategy, we were blown away by how the banking system was going to change while seemingly none of us were paying attention,” Meyer concluded. “SCFCU is prepared not only to participate in the future of decentralized finance, but we now find ourselves helping to influence the future for credit unions in this space. Chase Larson is a primary reason for this success.”