One of the immediate consequences of mergers of sound credit unions is the loss of their legacy and traditions created by generations of member service.
Often the continuing credit union tries to ameliorate this wasting by temporarily retaining the old name while consolidating operations and leadership under outside direction. And shortly thereafter comes the new brand.
Terms such as “goodwill” acknowledge the real value that the relationships and roles of long-serving firms bring their communities in addition to their economic contributions.
Family vs Public Business Success
A July 11, 2025 article in Bloomberg Opinion by Adrian Wooldridge suggests that the recognition and respect for a firm’s history may be a critical factors in the long term survival of family business versus that of most public companies.
Below are a few excerpts from his article Europe’s Best Family Firms Have a Secret Weapon Money Can’t Buy.
Tradition can’t be bought. It’s fashionable in business circles to pass over Europe with a sigh. But the best European family companies have survived everything history can throw at them, and the majority of businesses that have survived for 200-plus years are European,
Part of the answer lies in longevity: The best European family companies have survived plagues, famines, world wars, recessions, revolutions — and continue to thrive. The Henokiens Association, an international club of 57 family businesses that have survived for at least 200 years, includes only ten non-European members, all Japanese. . .
The typical life expectancy of any company, family or non-family, is only a couple of decades, and is falling. What explains the longevity of the best European family businesses? . . .
Tradition. Tradition is a unique resource which newer firms cannot match regardless of how much money they have: Thousands of companies produce wine, for example, but only the Frescobaldis in Tuscany can boast that their ancestor, Dino, rescued the first seven Cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy from destruction.
Tradition provides impossible to quantify corporate benefits: pride in collective achievements; the self-confidence to make difficult decisions; and, perhaps most important of all, a sense of perspective–family companies are much better than public companies at resisting the pressure of quarterly results for long-term results.
For their part, big public companies often suffer from a “crisis of banality”: in a world that is hungry for meaning, all too many of them adopt identical virtue-signaling language or forgettable names or logos. . .
They should study the art of storytelling practiced by the likes of Berry Bros. & Rudd founded in 1698 selling coffee. Even as some American tourists like to lament Europe’s supposed decline into a collection of monuments without any economic prospects, some of those monuments contain clever and innovative companies that will continue to thrive even after the giants of Silicon Valley have gone the way of Shelley’s Ozymandias.
The poem’s final stanza:
Chip, thanks for sharing. Half my clients are banks, and some bear the family name on the signage—a visible legacy for all to see. The way an institution treats its customers, employees, and community truly defines its reputation. Thank goodness for those willing to hold themselves accountable like this.