Huntington Bancshares Incorporated (NASDAQ:HBAN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Rich Pohle: Well, I would say it’s positive right now, and we’re certainly cautious as we enter a downturn, but everything that I’m looking at right now, Jon, is holding water exactly where we thought it would be our delinquencies, both in commercial and consumer are right where we would expect them to be. We had a very sharp drop in our commercial delinquencies and our commercial real estate delinquencies are essentially nothing. The momentum and NPA momentum that we’ve got both down 20% year-over-year, puts us in really good stead as we enter a downturn. So we’re looking at everything. Every portfolio we’re going deep into to make sure that we’re proactive in identifying potential issues and trying to get ahead of them in terms of working with customers as there’s potential problems.

But certainly, the headwinds are there in the economy, but we feel good about where the portfolio is positioned. Like I said, we’re not going to bat 1,000. We do have higher losses forecasted in ’23 than we had in ’22. So we understand that it’s going to be a more challenging environment, but we feel good where we’re sitting.

Jon Arfstrom : Okay. And then can you guys touch on the one fee line that stood out was Capital Markets. Can you touch on what you’re seeing there? You talked about Capstone and then some of your other businesses. Are these referrals coming to Capstone internally. Is it business generated on their own? And what do you think there in terms of the longer-term runway?

Zach Wasserman: In terms of — so this Zach. I’ll take that one. Capital markets is a real bright spot for us. the core underlying capital markets, excluding Capstone, grew 26% revenue year-over-year in 2022, and we expect another run rate of double-digit teams are above revenue growth as we go into ’23. So we’re seeing just really sustained traction in the underlying strategy there is to deepen relationships with additional clients continue to penetrate that set of services and products into our core customer base and reap the benefits of it. It’s been an area as you know that we’ve been investing in considerably over time, and we’re seeing that play through into incremental revenue growth. And then Capstone to your point, is a nice addition to that.

And I would tell you that Capstone is doing really, really well. They beat the plan for Q3. Overall, more than the $100 million run rate, if you look at the back half of revenues. I look at the back half of ’22, and we expect that to continue and sustain and continue to grow as we go into ’23. It’s early days, I would say, in getting client referrals from the Huntington base, but at the beginning, we are seeing, particularly as late to the pipeline and in the future, a lot of positive engagement of core Huntington clients with the Capstone team and with the service set there. And so it’s going to be an area that there’s continues to bear fruit and we’re quite bullish about the opportunity to grow capstones what was previously $100 million revenue run rate up into something that continues to perform well and above that as we go forward over time.

So it’s definitely a strong point at this point.