Huntington Bancshares Incorporated

Greetings and welcome to the Huntington Bank Shares second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'll now turn the conference over to your host, Tim Sedavris, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Operator. Welcome, everyone, and good morning. Copies of the slides we will be reviewing today can be found in the Investor Relations section of our website, www.huntington.com. As a reminder, this call is being recorded, and a replay will be available starting about one hour from the close of the call. Our presenters today are Steve Steinauer, Chairman, President, and CEO, and Zach Wasserman, Chief Financial Officer. Brendan Lawler, Chief Credit Officer, will join us for the Q&A. Earnings documents, which include our forward-looking statements disclaimer and non-GAAP information, are available on the Investor Relations section of our website. With that, let me now turn it over to Steve.

Thanks, Tim. Good morning, everyone, and welcome. Thank you for joining the call today. We're pleased to announce our second quarter results, which Zach will detail later. These results are supported by our colleagues who live our purpose every day as we make people's lives better, help businesses thrive, and strengthen the communities we serve. Now on to slide four. There are five key messages we want to share with you today. First, we are intensely focused on executing our organic growth strategies and leveraging our position of strength. Our robust liquidity and capital base put us in a position to drive growth and we are investing in new geographies and businesses in addition to existing businesses. Second, we expanded net interest income and we expect it to continue to grow sequentially from the first quarter trough. This outlook is supported by accelerating loan growth and sustained deposit growth to power future revenue expansion. Third, we drove fee revenues higher in the quarter with support from our three major focus areas, capital markets, payments, and wealth management. Fourth, we are achieving strong credit performance with stable net charge-offs, which are tracking as expected for the year. This is a direct result of our sustained and disciplined approach to credit over many years and our aggregate moderate to low risk appetite. Finally, we believe the net result of these actions will deliver expanded profitability from here and into 2025 and beyond. I will move us on to slide five to recap our performance. We delivered accelerated loan growth with average balances growing by $2 billion from a year ago. Annualized loan growth in the quarter was 4.7%. Average deposit balances also increased, growing $8 billion, or 5.5%, over the past year. Capital further strengthened with reported common equity Tier 1 of 10.4% and adjusted common equity Tier 1 of 8.6%, inclusive of AOCI. Liquidity remains top tier with coverage of uninsured deposits of 204%, a peer-leading level. Credit quality was stable as net charge-offs improved by one basis point from the first quarter to 29 basis points. We are sustaining momentum in the growth of our primary bank relationships with consumer and business increasing by 2% and 4% respectively year over year. Again, this past quarter, we seized the opportunity to add talented bankers. We're pleased to add new deposit-focused capabilities in the mortgage servicing and homeowners association title and escrow areas. These new teams build upon the prior investments we've made in the Carolinas, Texas, and three new specialty commercial verticals. As we shared last month, we are bringing in-house our merchant acquiring business within our payments organization to further accelerate revenues and capabilities. As I mentioned, our disciplined positioning of robust capital and liquidity enables our ability to sustain a growth posture. Capital continues to increase, with adjusted CET1 up approximately 50 basis points from a year ago. Liquidity continues to be robust, supported by sustained deposit gathering. We were pleased to once again deliver top quartile results in this year's CCAR stress test exercise, with Huntington's modeled credit losses second best in the peer group. Our stress capital buffer was reduced and came in at the minimum level of 2.5%. Across our markets, we see the broader economy continuing to hold up. Our new initiatives, teams, and geographies provide growth opportunities, even as the broader environment for customer loan demand remains somewhat muted. Zach, over to you to provide more detail on our financial performance.