Things you didn't know about UCU employees...

Spot light on:

Yuriy Nesvit speaks at a management
meeting in our Toronto HQ.

Yuriy Nesvit

Yuriy Nesvit is our (relatively) new Commercial Relationship Manager, he took charge of the portfolio in the summer and has been racking up new business across Ontario, working with our team of commercial lenders in Windsor, Oshawa and the GTA. Before that, Yuriy was our branch manager in St. Catharines for about two and a half years.

One thing that you may not know about Yuriy is that he is pretty handy at turning boars into barrows (Google it), his record is more than 200/day (ouch! – literally). His journey into the financial services field (we just kill ourselves with these half-baked puns!) started at the National State Agricultural University in Ukraine (also known as the Ukrainska Silsko Hospodarska Akademiya). He graduated with a “zootechnik” degree (closest we could figure is “Animal Husbandry”) with a major in beekeeping. “I had a 70 hive apiary back home,” says Yuriy.

Yuriy (far right) with members of the St. Catharines branch 

Advisory Committee last fall when he was 

the branch manager there.

Turns out beekeeping on its own was not enough to pay the bills, so Yuriy enrolled in law school, but when the opportunity arose to emigrate to Canada he jumped at the chance. Here he enrolled in school again, but this time in an MBA program which he successfully finished.

“Upon finishing my MBA, I decided to look at the pig from the other end,” he says. “So I became a lender at a bank in southwestern Ontario where I specialized in agricultural loans.”

 In his spare time Yuriy likes to enjoy the outdoors. He likes to camp and fish. You can see Yuriy catch a biggie at this link: Yuriy catches a fish. He also likes to play ping pong as a way to relax.

Yuriy in his best vyshyvka at the UCU AGM in 2011

His two biggest goals at the moment are to learn more languages (French, Spanish and maybe Mandarin) and to help his daughter, a very accomplished figure skater, achieve her dreams and appear in the Olympics.

Yuriy is a very cheerful guy, always smiling, always willing to share a joke, he even claims that he is always smiling in his sleep. We believe him as it is hard to think of a time when he is not in a positive mood.

To read profiles about other UCU members, employees and directors, please visit the Spolight on... page