"We encountered, what I would call, very constructive support from credit unions everywhere, that this (merger) represented a good approach for the future, a way to generate additional value for credit unions," Mercer said.

Within 30 to 45 days, the merger is expected to become official under the League of Southeastern Credit Unions & Affiliates name that will manage roughly $30 million in assets and an expanded portfolio of products and services for 342 credit unions in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. The combined leagues are expected to officially open for business by Jan. 1, 2020.

Mercer will lead the league/association services side of the organization, while La Pine will head up the business services as the CEO of a new holding company, Affiliated Consolidated Services.

ACS, which will be the wholly owned subsidiary of LSCU & Affiliates, will include LEVERAGE, the LSCU service corporation, and business services currently offered through the Georgia Credit Union Service Corporation and CSI. He will also oversee all shared back office services and functions for LSCU & Affiliates.

The actual closing of the consolidation is contingent on waivers and consents being completed. Next steps include the acquisition of two credit union service organizations (CUSOs) including Cooperative Services, Inc. (CSI), CUSC of Alabama, and the merger of the Georgia Credit Union Foundation into the Southeastern Credit Union Foundation. The shareholders of CSI have approved its sale as part of the larger league consolidation. CUSC of Alabama shareholders are expected to vote on their proposed sale to LSCU & Affiliates on July 11.

There are no plans for any staff layoffs and all offices will remain open.

The LSCU & Affiliates board will expand from 12 to 18, representing six board members from each state. A separate board of directors will oversee ACS.

"I think what we've done is different than anything that's out there today. We're actually going to be operating under a dual CEO structure for a period of time," LaPine explained. "The idea here is that we will both be very focused, and I think we'll get additional value during this period by having both CEOs with one focusing on the association side and one on the for-profit side." Although LaPine declined to comment on the consolidation's costs, he indicated because of the complexities of the merger, most of the costs involve legal fees to ensure that all of the details of the agreement will be correctly implements to avoid any unintended consequences after the fact.

However, he pointed out that the consolidation is expected to yield about $800,000 in annual operational savings and that number is expected to increase over time.

LaPine, nevertheless, emphasized that the approach to the merger of both leagues was not simply to cut costs.

"Both of our organizations came into this, looking at it as, 'How can we be better? How can one plus one equal three? How can we leverage our two organizations to be better together than we are apart?" he explained. "We said it very early on (that) you can't cut yourself to excellence. This wasn't about trying to just cut X amount of dollars or percentage (out) of the budget."

To address the overlaps of senior management positions, LaPine said it was done from the bottom up and not from the top down. The teams from each league met and discussed how to restructure staff positions in order to create the most effective teams under the new league.

"We had them design the structure. Also, we said, tell us what the organization chart would look like. Obviously, people will be reporting to different people," LaPine said. "At the same time, it was really driven not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up, which I think has given us a lot of buy-in from our teams to what we're trying to achieve, because the strength of our organization is the people we have working for us. We've designed it in a way that, hopefully, they will be going into this very excited about the future."