Huntington Bancshares Incorporated

Greetings and welcome to the Huntington Bank Share second quarter 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. The question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance, 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, Eric Wasserstrom, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our second quarter call. Our presenters today are Steve Steinauer, Chairman, President, and CEO, Rand Stanridge, President of Consumer and Regional Banking, 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, and copies of the slides we will be reviewing, are available on the Investor Relations section of our website, which is www.ir.huntington.com. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. and a replay will be available starting about one hour after the close of the call. With that, let me turn it over to Steve.

Thanks, Eric. Good morning, everyone, and welcome. Thank you for joining the call today. Now, turning to our results, I'll begin by outlining some key highlights, then Brant will talk about our opportunity with Veritex, and Zach will follow with a detailed review of the second quarter financials. As the environment around us continues to evolve, we remain committed to our vision of being the leading people first customer-centered bank in the country. We are focused on our core growth strategies and excited by the opportunities in front of us, including our recently announced acquisition of Veritex, which will greatly accelerate our growth in Texas. These opportunities are consistent with our longstanding aggregate moderate to low risk appetite, which has delivered strong and consistent results through the years. For this reason, we are well positioned to maintain our strong performance. On slide five, there are four key messages we want to leave you with today. First, we're delivering a strong operating performance with robust organic growth in loans, deposits, and fees. The business is performing exceptionally well, and through the second quarter, we are ahead of our plans for the year. I'd like to thank all of my colleagues for their extraordinary efforts this quarter and everything they do for our customers and company every day. Second, we're driving strong revenue and profit growth year over year, consistent with the strategy we shared at Investor Day in February. This performance is supported by our earning asset growth, expanded net interest margin, value-added fee services, and positive operating leverage. Third, credit performance continues to be stable at a low level of losses. reflecting the proactive management of our loan portfolios and our rigorous credit screening and discipline customer selection. And fourth, our strong financial foundation enables us to outperform through a range of potential economic scenarios. All of these factors contribute to our ability to support our customers, colleagues, and the communities we serve while driving value for our shareholders. Turning to slide six, I'll recap our performance in the second quarter. We grew average loans by almost $10 billion year-over-year, supported by both core businesses and new initiatives. Average deposit growth also increased by almost $10 billion over the same timeframe, highlighting the power of our deposit franchise to fund asset growth. Our deposit strategy remains focused on acquiring and deepening primary bank relationships, which we grew by 4 and 6 percent year-over-year in consumer and business banking, respectively. Importantly, we maintain disciplined deposit pricing while delivering this growth. Our investments in value-added fee services continues to deliver with 11% growth year-over-year in our strategic fee income areas of payments, wealth, and capital markets. In the quarter, we drove adjusted CET1 higher to 9%, hitting the lower bound of our targeted operating range of 9% to 10%. Credit performance remains top tier as debt charge-offs further improved by six basis points from the prior quarter to just 20 basis points. Our liquidity remains strong with two times coverage of uninsured deposits. Notably, our tangible book value increased 16% year over year. This growth in capital per share coupled with our strong level of adjusted ROTCE at 17.6% illustrates how our model is a powerful driver of value creation. We also advanced several strategic initiatives. We added a new middle market team in Florida and continued to roll out our full franchise expansion in North and South Carolina with branch openings. But most significant among our strategic advancements was our announced acquisition of Veritex. This combination will significantly accelerate our already strong organic growth in Texas. To recap the key elements of this important announcement, Let me turn it over to Brent.