Tech People in the Know: Casca’s Serhii Nechyporchuk

In what is a recurring feature, Finopotamus profiles interesting and intriguing tech professionals who are positively impacting the credit union industry.

For this issue, we visited with Casca’s Founding Machine Learning Engineer Serhii Nechyporchuk. The San Francisco-based fintech bills itself as offering FIs business loan application processing with 90% less manual effort and 300% higher conversion rates.

By W.B. King

Growing up in the Ukraine, Serhii Nechyporchuk’s family couldn’t afford a computer, but they did have a piano, which served as a tech bridge of sorts. “It all started with buttons [and keys]. As a kid, I was fascinated by anything to press,” he told Finopotamus. “When I finally got my first PC, I spent most of my time playing games, and one of them included a level editor with its own programming language. I couldn't understand it at the time, but it sparked my curiosity about how software was built.”

Serhii Nechyporchuk

Driven by the desire to build a website, he later taught himself HTML, CSS and PHP. While attending the National Technical University of Ukraine, he started to pursue programming, although he admitted other classmates took a shine to the craft faster.

“I went from feeling behind to graduating at the top of my class. What has kept me in technology is the realization that great engineering is about more than writing code,” he shared. “It's about understanding the bigger picture and the ‘why’ behind what you're building.”

Non-Negotiable Principles

Armed with a master’s degree in computer science, Nechyporchuk began his career in 2014 serving as a software engineer in different capacities at several Ukrainian companies. In 2024, he became a founding machine learning engineer at Casca.

“The fundamentals of how technology teams operate haven't changed that much. Agile and Scrum were already widely adopted when I started, and they're still the dominant ways of working today,” he continued. “The biggest shift has been infrastructure. The rise of cloud computing showed companies they were willing to pay more to avoid managing systems themselves.”

Opposed to 10 years ago, he said there are managed services for almost everything, and for most organizations that’s become the default approach. “Unless something significantly changes the industry's trust in cloud providers, I expect this trend to continue.”

Not a fan of creating unnecessary rules—whether for programming or people—as they need policies, Nechyporchuk believes in creating a few “clear, non-negotiable principles.” Examples, he noted, include “protecting production systems” and always being prepared for a customer demo.

“Within those boundaries, people are free to be creative, experiment, and take ownership,” he said. “I believe that's how you help the next generation of technologists grow, and I try to lead by example rather than by mandate.”

Unnecessary Complexity

When Finopotamus asked about his mentors, Nechyporchuk underscored how Rich Hickey, the creator of the Clojure programming language and a respected software engineer, shaped his career.

“What he taught me is that really thinking about a problem is non-negotiable. You solve problems by breaking them into small, composable, orthogonal pieces rather than relying on one all-in-one solution,” Nechyporchuk continued. “He also made a distinction that has stayed with me: Some complexity is inherent to the problem and can't be avoided, while some is accidental, created by the tools we use and the decisions we make.”

Among other major takeaways from Hickey’s tutelage is that unnecessary complexity quietly slows teams and businesses down. “I try to pay that forward by teaching these ideas to the people I work with and encouraging them to build solutions that are simpler, more focused, and easier to evolve over time,” he shared.

Hire Generalists

Explaining that Casca’s platform automates a “significant amount” of the manual work involved in lending, Nechyporchuk shared the company’s latest iteration of this innovation.

“We’re designing it to be agent-native from the ground up. Rather than trying to layer AI agents onto traditional core banking systems, we're building a platform where agent actions are built in from day one, with humans able to step in and intervene at any stage,” he noted. “That creates a much stronger foundation for security, control, and responsible AI adoption. The result is a platform that gives banks and credit unions the flexibility to build entirely new products.”

AI, especially AI agents, is an industry trend he keenly follows. Traditionally slow, manual tasks like underwriting process are becoming much faster due to large language models and AI agents being implemented directly into workflows, he said.

“That’s only going to accelerate, even if frontier models remain expensive, because open-source models are already more than capable of automating simpler work,” he continued. “The bigger shift is that AI makes engineers who understand their domain end to end far more powerful than those who only know one layer. As development moves faster, understanding how to compose and decompose systems becomes even more important.”

It is for these reasons Casca hire “generalists” who are excited to talk to customers and understand the problems they're solving, he added.

Remaining Focused on the Member Experience

Since credit unions are member-owned and driven, he said the “technology math” is different than other FIs. C-level leaders, he noted, make decision based on member experience and trust, not profit margins.

“Credit unions run much leaner IT teams than the big banks and rarely have entire engineering departments dedicated to supporting their systems. That’s exactly the gap we're building for,” he explained. “A big part of what makes Casca valuable is that it's dramatically simpler to use and configure than existing tools, allowing credit unions to access capabilities that were once reserved for the largest banks without needing an army of engineers to run them.”

By partnering with the right fintech, Nechyporchuk said credit unions can “punch far above their weight.” A “like-minded partner,” he added, closes that tech gap by absorbing the complexity, which allows the credit union to remain focused on its members.

“The partnership works when the fintech shares the credit union’s values by putting members first, acting as a trusted long-term partner, rather than treating the credit union as just another logo piece,” he told Finopotamus. “Get that alignment right, and even a small institution can move as fast as anyone in the market while staying exactly who its members expect it to be.”