Huntington Bancshares Incorporated

Greetings and welcome to the Huntington Bank Shares fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are on a 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 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Tim Sadabris, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Welcome, everyone, and good morning. Copies of the slides we will be reviewing today can be found on 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. Building on a good third quarter, we delivered very strong fourth quarter results, which Zach will detail later. 2024 was an exceptional year for Huntington, with our teams delivering accelerated growth over the course of the year. We're very grateful to our 20,000 colleagues who drove these results while living our purpose every day as we make people's lives better, help businesses thrive, and strengthen the communities we serve. Now onto slide four. There are five key messages we want to leave you with today. First, we drove record fee revenues and accelerated growth of loans and deposits. This reflected contributions from both existing and new businesses. Our investments into new geographies and capabilities are delivering attractive returns and we're seeing accelerated contributions from these new areas. We delivered sequential growth in both spread and fee revenues in the quarter. We move into 2025 with strong momentum. We are poised to deliver record net interest income and fee revenues for the full year. Third, we are executing our down beta action plans and lowering deposit pricing. This supports management of net interest margin through a dynamic interest rate environment. Fourth, we are achieving strong credit performance. This is a direct result of our disciplined client selection and rigorous portfolio management aligned with our aggregate moderate to low risk appetite. Fifth, through execution of our growth strategies, we are driving profit momentum into 2025 and beyond. I'll move us on to slide five to recap our performance last year. 2024 was a breakout year for Huntington. Our many years of consistent and disciplined management benefited us as we came into the year with robust liquidity and capital, as well as stable credit. This position of strength enabled us to accelerate growth in our core, add new capabilities and teams, and expand into new geographies in North and South Carolina, as well as Texas. We're just getting started here. We believe our investments and focused execution will deliver robust organic growth in future years. The results in 2024 included growing average deposits by over $7.5 billion and growing average loans by over $3.5 billion. Our growth accelerated over the course of the year with our new initiatives increasing contributions to our overall results. Additionally, our fee revenue businesses are performing exceptionally well. Within payments, we brought in-house our merchant acquiring capabilities and increased treasury management products and services. Within wealth management, we're expanding advisory household relationships 9% year over year and gathering increased wealth assets from our customers. Capital markets set a new quarterly record for revenue in the fourth quarter at $120 million, an increase of 74% from a year ago. Turning to slide six, let me take a moment to share the top level revenue trends we've delivered. The organic growth we are driving continues to significantly outpace our peer group. We are well positioned to drive attractive and sustained revenue. These revenue growth trends support expanding PPNR into 2025 and beyond. Now let's turn to slide seven. The growth opportunities today are the most attractive they've been since I joined Huntington. We have three primary areas of focus. These include executing the organic growth strategy I shared earlier, driving revenues higher, and maintaining our consistent approach to risk management. We have numerous growth levers, both in our existing markets and businesses, as well as the collective set of expanded geographies and new capabilities. We see substantive opportunities to expand loans, deposits, and value added fee revenues. These efforts will result in sustained revenue expansion in both fee and spread revenue. Huntington benefits from a consistent approach to risk management that has served us well for many years. We expect this bedrock principle to remain unchanged as we maintain our aggregate moderate to low risk appetite. Zach, over to you to provide more detail on our financial performance.