The shape of a plan by a group of small credit unions to blend their businesses with Bendigo and Adelaide Bank is emerging, but questions remain over the future of equity interests of credit union members in the venture.Service One, AWA, BDCU (formerly Berrima) and Circle credit unions are all in talks with Bendigo initiated two years ago.The first of these has A$300 million in assets. The others are so small they fail to make the KPMG survey of the sector. Circle, for one, has $30 million in assets.The four have collaborated on a reduced version of a plan first conceived years earlier by Cuscal that would have rolled up a number of small credit unions into a single entity sharing a single balance sheet. That project was intended to give smaller credit unions survival options outside of a more conventional merger.While Cuscal and most credit unions involved in that process pursued different paths, Service One and the others resolved to seek an alternative outcome that achieved similar goals.One aspect of the commercial direction of these talks can be gleaned from recent applications by Bendigo for trademarks under an "Alliance Bank" umbrella brand. The five trademarks applied for are: Alliance Bank, Service One Alliance Bank, Circle Alliance Bank, AWA Alliance Bank, and BDCU Alliance Bank.Brian Virtue, chair of Geelong-based AWA, wrote in the 2013 annual report that "we have been working with several like-minded credit unions to explore ideas to effectively address our current and foreseeable challenges and provide a better long-term future for our members and staff. "We will continue to diligently assess these opportunities in an attempt to enhance our current business model and to secure our organisation's long term wellbeing."All four credit unions have called meetings of members to amend their rules, replacing the term "credit union" with "mutual."Other rule changes tinker with the details of members agreeing to transfer assets, a step seen by critics as a method to demutualise.This first round of rule changes has won member support so far at Service One, endorsing what the board termed a proposal "to provide greater flexibility for the Board to present business opportunities to members moving forward."The rule change at Service One spells out that the directors have the power to "transfer the whole or substantially the whole of the mutual's business where the transaction is in the ordinary course of the mutual's business."The proposed business model calls for Bendigo to act as product supplier and to service customer needs, potentially leading to job losses for some current credit union staff.The four credit unions would thus, in effect, be franchises of Bendigo in a manner of the existing community bank branches of Bendigo.Each credit union would continue to exist as a mutual, with member's equity interests retained. However, each mutual would have to fund any redundancies and associated business liquidation expenses from members' reserves.This last detail is controversial, with other mutual ADIs frustrated at the lack of an opportunity to present alternative merger plans to members.Other for-profit