The primary problem with the merger was time–too much of it. "When we looked at pursuing this merger, we thought we would be sending the application in during the third quarter and getting approval and merging in the first quarter. It became prolonged. As the largest merger in history, it accordingly took a lot of time," said Birdwell. "Timing is everything, and it has to be right."

He said this caused some internal issues at Southeast. "It put us at risk for losing key members of our staff. They didn't know what was going to happen, and it made it difficult to hire new staff without knowing the future," said Birdwell. The corporate began to worry about service problems cropping up.

Interestingly, neither Southeast nor Southwest put the blame on burdensome regulations. They said just the sheer complexity and scale of combining a $10 billion corporate with a $4 billion corporate was going to take much longer than anticipated. They both noted that while they each had done their due diligence, it was time to bring in a third-party to review the merger, and they were expecting heavy delays in that process.

"The reason we did this in the first place was in our members' interest. If we were going to put the service level of our members at risk, we weren't willing to do that. This is in our members' best interest. I'm excited about us going forward," said Birdwell, who doesn't expect this merger to be considered again any time soon. Southeast does have to make some quick moves from a facility standpoint. About three years ago it started planning for a new headquarters building, and has already begun construction. But because of the merger it decided to just build a shell building, and let the new buyer build to suit. Now Southeast is going to reverse that plan and build out the 30,000 square-foot building to suit its needs. "We are disappointed. We think it would really have been a good combination," said Jody Beck, senior vice president of operations and interim CEO of Southwest. Beck said the merger is ending primarily because of internal reasons at Southeast. "We understand those reasons they've expressed. These corporate mergers nowadays are extremely time consuming. We understand the intensity of this." Beck said Southwest is always open to mergers that make sense. This isn't the first merger not to come to fruition for Southwest. A proposed merger with Georgia Central died off about five years ago because of issues surrounding how capital would be treated after the merger. Southwest too has to make some changes because of the merger being called off. The Southwest board now has to restart its search for a new CEO. Beck had no details on the board's plan.

"Their employees and our employees have put in a lot of time. They've been out here, and we've been to their offices. We've talked about working together on other projects that we've identified and they are still really good ideas," she said.

One clear area of duplication among the two is item processing. Each corporate has an item processing facility in Florida and Birdwell believes image exchange is one area they can partner.

This was one of two major corporate mergers in play. The other is the merger of the $27 billion WesCorp and the $1 billion VolCorp. That merger has run into some regulatory difficulty on the state level in Tennessee, but a new proposal may be moving that merger forward. This also means that the merger of the $5.7 billion Mid-States and $4 billion Empire Corporate, now Members United Corporate FCU, remains the largest corporate merger completed to date. –[email protected]