Creating Canada’s largest credit union Coast Capital/Prospera/Sunshine Coast Credit Unions

Three credit unions. Three distinct member identities. Three separate employee cultures. And a vote that had to pass in all three organizations for Canada’s largest-ever credit union merger to happen—meaning any one of them could have stopped it.

When Coast Capital, Prospera, and Sunshine Coast announced plans to merge, the strategic rationale was compelling: a $38.6 billion national credit union with the scale to be a genuine alternative to the big banks. The challenge was that scale means nothing to a member who has spent decades trusting a local institution that feels like theirs.

What we found

The risk wasn’t unfamiliarity—members understood what a merger was. The risk was identity. Voting yes meant agreeing to give up something local, known, and trusted in exchange for something larger and less personal. The bigger the ambition, the greater the implied loss for anyone who valued what they already had.

The strategic answer couldn’t lead with size or strength or national reach—those were leadership arguments, not member arguments. It had to start with what members cared about: their values, their ownership, their voice. The case for the merger had to be built on what would be amplified, not what would be left behind.

What we did

We built a unified narrative grounded in shared purpose and member benefit—honest about the scale of the change, specific about why it was worth making, and consistent across all three organisations simultaneously. That last part mattered as much as the message itself: with three member bases watching each other, any inconsistency between organizations would have fed doubt.

The work spanned internal alignment across three leadership teams, employee ambassador programmes to carry the narrative authentically at the branch level, multilingual member resources, executive preparation for public forums, and a robust issues management plan for the moments—inevitable in a change this size—when the story needed defending.

The Results

Yes votes of 78% to 91% across all three organisations. The successful creation of a $38.6 billion national credit union—the largest credit union merger in Canadian history.