Ent Credit Union Completes Merger With Wings, Transition to Wings Brand Underway for Nearly 1 Million Members

Ent Credit Union and Wings Credit Union have completed their merger, but the nearly 1 million members of the combined financial institutions shouldn’t see many changes immediately other than seeing more of the Wings name.

Wings merged into Ent with Ent CEO Chad Graves keeping the title, but the merged entity will operate under the Wings name; Wings Chairman Greg Miller will head the board of directors. Ent’s website, emails, statements and other communications now carry a logo that says “Ent Credit Union Becoming Wings Credit Union,” but a “refreshed” Wings brand will be rolled out near mid-year, Ent told members by email in January.

“You will be receiving more and more [information] in the next few weeks, and as we get more information, we will share it,” Graves said during an interview in mid-January. “Nothing is changing [immediately] — checks, debit cards and credit cards still work.”

The Wings name will appear when members order new checks or their cards expire and are reissued, and loan terms remain unchanged.

Ent also will remain a partner of the Denver Broncos and its name will stay on the Ent Center for the Arts on the University of Colorado Colorado Springs campus. The combined organization will continue its community support efforts — the two credit unions donated more than $15 million during the past 10 years. Last month, Wings agreed to a multiyear partnership with the Minnesota Timberwolves NBA team and Lynx WNBA team.

“The whole point of this merger is building something better for members: convenience, technology and better community impact all will come as a result of the merger, but we will still have the same great people,” Graves said.

“We have selected our core systems and will switch one side or the other and have a new technology base to offer members additional products and services — that will be a differentiator for us.”

Graves said Wings doesn’t have any examples of new financial products and services ready to share because the credit union wants to ensure its technology is ready to provide them, but one possibility he mentioned was selling cars through Amazon. Ent and Wings had a combined total of nearly $2.2 billion in loans on new and used vehicles as of Sept. 30, according to the latest available data.

Ent and Wings began working on combining the organizations as soon as the merger agreement was signed in late February, although the deal wasn’t announced until nearly two months later. Graves said teams of employees traveled between Ent’s Colorado Springs and Wings’ Minneapolis-area headquarters to meld the corporate culture and operational alignment, efforts that will continue through this year.

Graves said the two credit unions brought in management consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers to “make sure we had the right targeted operational model” and may hire other “partners to make sure we maintain our culture of members first.”

He praised the merger teams for gaining regulatory approval of the merger in four months — a process federal regulators said could take up to 18 months.

The biggest change other than the name will come in June, when Ent starts using Wings’ online banking platform, which Graves said will be faster, very secure and better than the platform Ent now uses.

Graves said 150 key systems will be either maintained or converted during the next two to three years, including a new financial management system for deposits, loans and transactions that will be rolled out in 2028.

“2026 is about making sure both teams come together and focus on organizational alignment and culture so service in both Colorado and Minnesota feels local and members see as better,” Graves said.

“We are making sure we don’t take our eye off the ball. We have almost 1 million members in 90 locations [branches] and we want to make sure that members don’t feel like anything is different.”

Graves said changing the signs on Ent’s location “will take a while because there are hundreds of signs.”

Ent members won’t be able to use Wings branches outside Colorado — 27 branches in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin — until 2028 or 2029.

The merger resulted from a phone call in fall 2024 between Graves and Wings CEO Frank Weidner while both had been considering mergers to cope with additional regulatory burdens the Dodd-Frank Act, passed after the 2008 financial crisis, imposed on financial institutions with assets of more than $10 billion.

Ent exceeded $10 billion in assets temporarily in June and Wings hit $9.7 billion in assets in March.

Ent was started in 1957 to serve military and civilian personnel at Ent Air Force Base, now the site of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s Colorado Springs Training Center, and grew by adding the workers of hundreds of other employers until gaining approval to serve all residents of El Paso and Teller counties in 1999.

The credit union expanded to the Denver and Pueblo areas in 2004 and the rest of the Front Range in 2018.

Seven Northwest Airlines (now merged into Delta Air Lines) employees started Wings in 1938, and it expanded as Northwest grew, eventually gaining approval to serve employees throughout the air transportation industry.

The credit union acquired Brainerd Savings & Loan in Minnesota in 2021 and Settlers Bank in Wisconsin in 2022 to expand its branch network and business banking services.