Australian Unity chief executive David Bryant believes he has a good model for consolidating mutuals and is on the lookout for merger opportunities.Australian Unity, a health insurance, funds management and retirement living group, completed the merger of its subsidiary Lifeplan Australia Building Society with Big Sky Credit Union in February.The immediate benefit of the merger is that Australian Unity will be able to offer a bigger suite of banking products to its 285,000 members.Bryant said: "Since the financial crisis the savings and investment pools have come together. Cash and term deposits are now part of the investment mindset."The boundary between the investment world and the banking world has gone. That is the big structural change of the past five years."But, in the longer term, Bryant believes that a mutual sitting in a holding company structure has a better opportunity to grow its business than does a standalone mutual. "If you are a standalone mutual you have to manage growth of the business with your regulatory capital. You have the pressure of conflicting demands for regulatory capital and capital for growth."We can supply Big Sky [now called Big Sky Building Society] with expansion capital that is separate from the regulatory capital of the building society." Big Sky has a strong presence in mining communities in Western Australia and Queensland. It is reviewing plans for branch expansion in these areas.Bryant said that even large conglomerations of mutuals faced capital pressure that limited growth opportunities. He is keen to expand his alternative model and is on the lookout for more mergers, he said."In our discussions with other mutuals they acknowledge that they always want to do more but have these limitations."The issue around mergers is often that they want to retain their identities, which might have come out of their community or corporate or union origins. "The model we have in mind is a number of brands operating a collective balance sheet and having their business development funded from other parts of the group."