First Horizon Corporation (FHN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
March 3, 2026
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Michael Rose
AnalystsHello. Good morning, everyone. My name is Michael Rose. I'm one of the bank analysts here at Raymond James. Thank you so much for being here with us this morning. I'm very pleased to have First Horizon with us today with roughly $84 billion in assets and a market cap of about $11.5 billion. First Horizon is a top 25 commercial bank with operations across the Southeast and in several Southwest markets. It also operates specialty -- several specialty banking segments as well as provides a broad range of banking services for both corporate and retail investors. With us today from the company is CFO, Hope Dmuchowski; Chief Credit Officer, Thomas Hung; as well as Director of Investor Relations, Tyler Craft in the audience. Before I jump into questions, I just wanted to pass the mic to Hope for any opening remarks. Hope?
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesThank you, Michael. I just want to thank you all for being here and say it's been another unusual start to the year. I had all these prepared remarks over last week when Michael sent us the questions, and now it all seems completely different this morning. But I think this is somewhat the new normal. Proud of First Horizon, where we've been in the last couple of years, as Tom and I were prepping for today and a lot of the questions you have, we just kept saying, well, First Horizon continues to form regardless of increasing rates, decreasing rates, closing an MOE in the middle of COVID, a deal that doesn't go through, we could not be more proud of where our company is, the strength and stability of our balance sheet, the strong client relationships we have, and it is a great time to be a Southeast bank.
Michael Rose
AnalystsI would agree with that. Hope, maybe we can start at a macro level. Obviously, 2025, there was a lot of volatility. It seems like there's a lot of volatility now. We had some high-profile bankruptcies in the fall. Some of that resurfaced last week overseas. Just as we think about kind of as a recap, what are some of the milestones that the company achieved last year for the benefit of the audience? What are some of the things that you're most proud of? And then what are a few things that you're working on that we should contemplate as we move through the year?
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesYes. The thing that we're proud of and what we achieved earlier than we had committed to investors is sustained 15% ROTCE in both Q3 and Q4. We did an Investor Day in June of 2023, we said that we were targeting to mid-teens ROTCE. We got there about a year earlier than we had told the Street. So as soon as we saw that we were going to print a mid-teens number, we had another conference, not yours, but a different one, sorry, yours was not at that time. And we said we're going to hit 15% ROTCE was our next target. As soon as we hit 15%, we said 15% plus ROTCE. So we really focus on how do we return profitably to the shareholders. Top line growth that erodes shareholder value is not the way to grow a business for the long term. We've been here for almost 162 years, and we run the bank to be here another 162 years. I'm also really proud of our credit. As we look out at all of the different economic factors that we faced since 2019 and 2020 when we closed an MOE in the middle of COVID, our credit has held up really well. We brought our Chief Credit Officer, Tom Hung here today. I'm going to ask him to talk a little bit about our underwriting discipline that helps us through any economic scenario.
Thomas Hung
ExecutivesYes, absolutely. Thanks for bringing up credit. I think last year, we -- I'm also proud of the fact we reported close to 3% net loan growth while maintaining some of the strongest credit quality in the whole industry. I think it's one thing to grow. It's another thing to be able to grow, maintain your credit discipline and continue to perform through all the twists and turns we saw last year.
Michael Rose
AnalystsGreat. Maybe sticking along those lines, deregulation was a big theme last year and will continue to be as we move through this year. From your perspective, what are some of the developments you are most excited about for both First Horizon and the industry? And then what actions does the company plan to take to optimize new regulatory frameworks? Obviously, it's a broad topic, but we'd appreciate your thoughts around things like Basel III end game, asset threshold, stress testing and the like.
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesYes. The quick change we saw with the change in administration is the pace of new rules. There's been no new rules proposed by this administration. At the changeover, there was over 30 pending rules. And it was exhausting for banks to constantly get a new rule, get a proposed rule, put in your commentary period, then get the final rule, then implement it. And we were doing 20 or 30 at any given time for a few years. And that pace was just really distracting to the organization having to put new guardrails up, new policies, procedures, new second line checks. And so it's been really great to be able to run under a set of rules that isn't changing. As far as the rollbacks, we do continue to hear from Miki Bowman that we're going to see some resetting of the threshold. So hopefully, that $100 billion would move up somewhere we're hearing anywhere from 150 to 200. Nobody's really said exactly where, but at least it sounds like it will be material. And that gives us a lot of room to grow organically. We've talked before, we did our LFI preparedness. We were in the first year of getting ready. We have a road map. But if that gets moved up, it gives us significantly more time to focus on organic growth, returning profitability to shareholders and not having to put all those new LFI requirements in.
Thomas Hung
ExecutivesYes. I would just add, I feel very, very good about where we are in our regulatory relationships. I have a very regular dialogue with our regulators. And ultimately, we all want the same thing, which is to build a safe and sound bank. But the collaboration between regulators and ourselves, I'm very pleased with.
Michael Rose
AnalystsThat's great. Thanks for sharing. But maybe just separately, I know it hasn't been too much of a topic here as of late, but there's still some discussion around the future of stable coins in banking given maybe some more of the recent debates around interest-bearing coins and criticism of the GENIUS Acts efficiency. So maybe if you can just walk us through that.
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesYes. We're, like everyone else, waiting for the rules to be finalized on the new GENIUS Act. I think it was announced last week or the week before by Bloomberg. We are one of the key banks that are part of the new carry network that [indiscernible] setting up that I think -- I don't think they've announced how many exactly banks. I think in an article, they said a dozen or 2 dozen have already signed up, and I know they have more in the wing so that we can create a stable coin that's made for and run by the banking system instead of each one of us trying to do our own, being a part of that, being an early investor and adopter, I think, is one of the ways that we're doing that. We are also -- our wealth platform converted to LPL at the end of last year. LPL is looking at how do they custodian that. We also have just about every vendor coming in to meet with me or the Head of Product or Head of Technology because they have every solution for the rule that hasn't been written yet. And so constantly just looking at what they're doing, what are the different options. I think it's going to move quickly once the rule is done, and our goal is to be ready for it.
Michael Rose
AnalystsCan you discuss the carry network for the benefit of the people in the room? I'm not sure everyone is familiar with what's trying to be built.
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesYes. The carry network is a collection of banks that are looking at how do we issue and move stable coin across the banking system in an efficient, safe way. I mean that really comes down to it. A lot of the bigger banks are going to issue their own stable coin. They have global infrastructure for the regional banks and the smaller banks being able to pull our intellectual property. There was just a meeting last week or the week before, where all of our cybersecurity experts got on the call and talked about how to build the network. So you're being able to use a larger group of specialists to help build something that benefits the banks that are part of it.
Michael Rose
AnalystsGreat. And maybe just sticking with technology. I mean there was obviously some noise last week in the past couple of weeks just around AI and what it could do to the banking system as a whole. Just -- I know you guys have a team in place. You talked about that on the past call. Maybe if you could just provide some of the objectives there and discuss when you estimate some of the cost savings could actually flow through and how meaningful they could be from a net perspective?
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesI would say we're already starting to see the cost benefits come through. We have flat expense guidance this year, excluding our countercyclical businesses. And our flat expense guidance includes us hiring new bankers, investing more in technology this year than last year, opening new branches. So why we're investing, we're able to maintain costs. Part of that is AI. What we're really seeing is the ability to add efficiency, quality and scale. And so we have not had the -- oh, we're going to take up 20% of a team, but we're not having to hire up as we have 3% loan growth. I'll have Tom comment. We just had our top leaders together in Memphis. You were nice enough to join us at our leadership forum, I think it was a year ago. And so we had that again last week, and we had a whole session on AI and technology and our credit -- our Head of our Credit Analyst team presented a new AI tool to help make credit underwriting easier. So I'll let Tom talk a little bit about that, but just a proof point of how we're continuing to iterate and find new ways to use it.
Thomas Hung
ExecutivesYes, I would love to. I think there's a lot of talk already about the efficiencies of AI, what it can do in terms of making a financial analysis, financial spreading more efficient, faster, quicker, more accurate. I want to spotlight actually something a little bit different. What I'm even more excited about beyond just the efficiency is what it can do in terms of data analytics. With a portfolio the size of ours, of course, we're always trying to look at comparable data, operating comparables across geographies, across industries. AI and what it can do not only makes that a lot more faster, a lot more efficient, but also allows us to pull in a lot more data. And beyond -- and not just within our own portfolio, but outside of that, the wealth of information that are in public filings everywhere, the information that can be pulled from the footnotes to public filings, that's a lot of great data we can use as well to make better, faster decisions, and that's what I'm really excited about.
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesAnd we're also seeing AI really impact the client. All of our partners where we have a software partner or provider are rolling out Agentic AI. Salesforce was an early adopter. We were one of the early banks on that. We've seen great success. We have better next best action for our clients, better list on who would be the right person to offer this to. In fact, our marketing budget has been a little over a couple of quarters because it was so good that the take rate we were modeling the offers on, it's actually coming higher because it has such quality data algorithms within Salesforce using our client data to say, here are the clients you want to market to, here's the clients you want to call. And so we're seeing it penetrate everywhere. I don't think it's this one and done or one way of doing it. It's got to be bottoms up where everybody is using it in the company. We've talked before, Michael, with you about how we built our own. Before Tyler Craft became the IR Director, he was the Head of AI, and he rolled out our own ChatGPT called ChatFHN that we all get reports on who the top users are. I'll tell you last month, I got my report on who the top user and my team was. I said, "Tyler, who is that person?" I didn't know him, 4 levels down, incentive analysts, who's doing the incentives, incentive season, and he had maybe 2 or 3x anybody else use the tool. And so you're even able to see how some of the talent that may not be telling you they're using it is making their day so much quicker, so much more efficient.
Michael Rose
AnalystsThat's great. It's going to be interesting to see the way it evolves over the next decade or so. Maybe if we can move on from high level and maybe move into some of the client segment stuff. And I know loan growth looking mid-single digits this year. Are we kind of at the point where you're seeing broader signs of comfort from borrowers. I know this last week is probably thrown a wrench into some of that. But certainly, the environment, I think, was feeling better. I think what we've generally heard around credit has been pretty stable. Borrowers are getting more comfortable borrowing. Can you just talk to us about kind of the health of the borrower and the economy and what the prospect of potentially lower rates, although they're higher in the last couple of days, what that could mean for loan growth?
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesI'm going to answer that question with the caveats. I'm going to tell you what I would have said last Friday because I don't have any newer data from our clients 4 days into this Iran conflict to know how it's behaved. But our clients have gotten comfortable with the tariff rules. They've gotten comfortable with some of the decreasing rate environment, the unknown of when the next rate cut may come or if it comes, they've gotten comfortable with that. We saw strong C&I growth at the beginning of the quarter. We're continuing to see C&I pull through. CRE is still paying down a lot of the construction CRE that we did stabilize and then going into the secondary market. We don't want to 20 years. I mean that is how our professional CRE group works as we do the fund up when it's stabilized, it goes into the secondary market. And mortgage warehouse is behaving seasonally as we normally see, which is Q1 a little bit lower. But lower-end consumers have been struggling for years. We haven't seen that get worse. I don't think it's going to get any better in the near term. Tom anything you'd add?
Thomas Hung
ExecutivesI'm going to start with the same caveat of it's too early to know really the effects of the events of the last several days. But if I go back to last week, I think the overall sentiment is certainly pretty good. We've come into the year with very strong pipelines. Hope mentioned CRE in Q4, we saw an increase in total CRE commitments as a bank. And so that just -- when we do a lot of construction projects. So what I would reasonably expect from that is we'll start to see some good fund ups in our CRE. But if I look at where the peak was relative to where we are in rates, it's been 175 basis points. That's significant enough for there to be -- for projects in both the CRE and the C&I side that may not have penciled out at the peak to really start to pencil out now. And so that's why I think we're seeing it in our momentum in our pipeline.
Michael Rose
AnalystsMaybe just a follow-up on the tariff question. Now that some of that's been struck down, I mean, could that actually spur some loan growth in your mind?
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesYes, we'd hope so. It was struck down and then it was 10%, and then it was 15%. I'm not sure. I think we're still at 10% for 90 days. It hasn't hit the front of the Wall Street Journal with the conflict going on. So I'm not exactly sure where the executive order is now. But yes, tariffs being rolled back, I think, would be very good. It continues -- we continue to hear from our customers that the tariff costs being pushed on to them. Their cost of goods is going up and they're not able to increase the sales pricing anymore. They were able to do that when rates were rising. They were able to do that after COVID, but the consumer has less discretionary spending. And so rate increases for them so it has been a pretty material impact to their last year.
Thomas Hung
ExecutivesYes. I would just add, I mean, in isolation, tariffs going away should certainly help. But with the uncertainty of what's going on right now, we got to figure out which factor is going to have a greater influence.
Michael Rose
AnalystsI completely understand. Maybe we've heard you talk about the importance of the relationship between your bankers and credit teams. Maybe how do you think about taking your model to market? And then what does this do to create differentiation for First Horizon in the marketplace?
Thomas Hung
ExecutivesYes. I think something we very intentionally do and something we're very proud of is we do push credit decision-making as close to the customer as possible. And so for us, what that means is my entire team of credit officers is literally dispersed throughout our footprints. They work close to the customers, close to the deal teams. And the big advantage of that is the credit analysis and the work that we do goes far beyond just looking at the numbers and reading reports and discussing things in a conference room. Our credit officers are on site at our customers, visiting with them, talking with management. I'm a big, big believer there is so much more to credit decision-making beyond just ratios and numbers on a piece of paper. And I believe that culture, touching and feeling our customers, being on site, knowing their business, directly knowing the management team, staying updated, things don't always go according to plan. But when you have that type of relationship and you have that type of access, you're able to react a lot faster. When you add all of that up together, I think that's the biggest driver behind our consistently strong credit performance regardless of what's going on in the economy.
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesAnd what I really like about our model, we talk about this a lot, we run a decentralized model. Our credit analysts sit in the markets they're in. So when they're meeting with a prospect or a client, your credit analyst is there. They didn't fly in from Memphis. They didn't fly in from New York. They're part of your community. They know your community. They know the economic factors. They know what's happening. We had a recent regional President tell us they were in front of a client. They had their credit analyst with them. They had the relationship manager with them, and it was a great client. Everything looked great. And they're like, "Okay, well, who do you need to talk to in order to get this deal done?" She's like, "I can approve it now." And they say, "What do you mean?" The credit analysts here, we've already looked at it. We can approve it. You're approved for this at this rate. Let's just run some underwriting. And they said, "That's it?" And she said, "Yes, the decision is made here with you." Now if that client hadn't been so good, obviously, she would have said, "Well, let me go talk to my credit team." Poor Tom's team ends up being the bad guy that has to say no to the greatest client a banker has ever seen, but it makes a difference, especially when you are in the Southeast markets, which really pride themselves on being a part of their community, investing back in their community, and it has been a differentiator. But it comes with a cost. So we tell our bankers all the time, there's value in you and your team. And so we don't have the lowest -- we have a great margin. And one of the reasons we have one of the highest margins in the industry is we pay for that advice and counsel.
Michael Rose
AnalystsSo we've seen a lot of banks move away from the decentralized structure over the past 20 years, and you guys seem firmly committed to it. It may be a little bit more costly to do so. But how do you limit risk by keeping a decentralized credit structure when others have moved the other direction?
Thomas Hung
ExecutivesYes. I'm very proud of what we do on the risk and analytics side, the data analytics side. There's a lot of data that's always flowing between regions up and down the chains. And so that way, we always have a very good view across our whole portfolio. I believe to be able to have the type of sustained credit performance we've been able to have, what that really shows is consistency despite operating across the entire Southeast, a lot of different markets and a lot of very different markets. As you can imagine, a Tennessee is very different from a Florida, which is very different from the Carolinas and elsewhere. But what we have is a very ingrained credit culture, offers, I mean doing this a long time. We're constantly communicating with each other. There's a lot of our knowledge sharing and data analytics going on behind the scenes. And that's why what you see has been consistency across the board.
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesAnd although it's a costly model on a personnel basis, if you look at our top-tier, top quartile margin with our bottom quartile charge-offs, I'll tell you that, that pays back over time because you have credit selection, you have knowing your client and you might be able to do it really cheaply from a call center in a centralized location. They have no idea about the client. They have no idea about the market. They haven't driven the street to know that the building next door is being demolished and all of a sudden, Main and Main is now going to be 10 blocks up where the new target is going. And so I really, as a CFO, say, top-tier margin, lowest charge-offs, the model is really not as expensive as everyone else thinks it is.
Michael Rose
AnalystsNo, I agree with that. Maybe we can just shift to deposits. You guys talked about deposit growth outpacing loan growth this year. I think you've talked a fair amount about your new treasury management platform coming online. And obviously, you continue to open up branches. How should we think about the intermediate to long-term deposit growth opportunity for the franchise, particularly given we've seen a lot of dislocation in and around your markets? And could you see that loan-to-deposit ratio coming down and the mix improving?
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesYes. We've said we hope to have mid-single-digit loan growth and deposit growth. The H8 data isn't showing that quite in the economy yet. It hasn't been the booming start to the year that we were all hoping somewhere below 1% in H8 data year-to-date. But the way we think about it, it is treasury management. It's knowing our clients. We've talked before about we hired a new Head of our Consumer Retail business. We've broken that out from the regional presidents. So there's a singular focus on consumer versus commercial clients. As we've gotten bigger, that's really been needed. There's different product sets. There's different economic situations that hit. And so as we look at it, we're comfortable with where our loan-to-deposit ratio is. We don't feel that we're -- we have an issue with. It's within our internal guardrails. The way we look at it is loans plus securities as a percentage of deposit and then we're peer average. So if we want to bring our loan-to-deposit ratio down, I would say we could take our next deposit and park it in security, but I'd rather take the next deposit and put it in a loan. So when we internally have our benchmarks, we look at loans plus securities. As much as I can grow the next dollar of deposit, I want to spend $0.75 of it, if not more, lending it to a client to continue shareholder value. But the new Fed chair, it will be interesting to see if he shrinks the balance sheet, what happens to deposits. If deposits in the U.S. economy shrink, loans are going to have to rationalize as well. So I think there's a lot of wait and see, but it is hand-to-hand combat for deposits. It's not just rate anymore. I think a lot of shoppers have gotten a little bit tired of the rate shopping and moving their money every 30 or 60 days unless they have a wealth adviser doing it for you, but we had a top of market offer at the end of last year in consumer, and we didn't see the take rate we've seen 2 years before.
Michael Rose
AnalystsHave you seen those trends maybe accelerate here in the past month or so? It seems like other banks that we talk to have said competition seems a little bit firmer than it was maybe 2 or 3 months ago.
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesCompetition, top of rate is back, but we don't see the money moving as we have in past years. I'm not sure if it's the uncertainty of the economy. I don't know if it's fatigue. We definitely see it in the wealth business because somebody is managing that for them. And when you look at the outflows going to JPMorgan Wealth or Charles Schwab, but you see it come in and out, right? It's more of an arbitrage on what their deal is. But the average consumer, we're really not seeing a lot of movement from them. Even when we have rate offers, we had some pretty nice rate offers that were equal to Fed funds at the end of Q3 last year in 2 of our growth markets, and we had a 10% to 20% pickup, and that was it. 2 years ago, when we did that, we raised $6 billion in 30 days. I mean we raised $10 million, $20 million in 30 days with an equal to Fed funds rate. And it was really a test in some of our growth markets to see how is rate playing out now. And it just really didn't make a difference. They still are looking for stability. They're still looking for product quality. What's fraud, the number one thing that we see for client accounts being closed or opened with us is fraud. Fraud on their account. The Trump administration has put a lot of time to start talking about fraud, how many elderly people are being hit by specifically. We can't stay ahead of fraud. I'll go back to your AI question. The number one use case we have for AI right now is fraud. It's trying to figure out when we get hit in a day and you start looking for those patterns of what are the things that we should be looking for. We had a issue at treasury management, I think, in December, I start to lose track of what the months are, but we started to see and there were some really clear patterns of what bank they were clearing through the first amount, the second amount, the third amount, and we were able to say, okay, anything that does this stop it, send it to the banker, have the banker call the client and say, were you trying to wire this money out of your treasury management platform. We could have never done that with humans before. But they programmed it instantaneously look for these and then stop any payments going out of our treasury management system.
Michael Rose
AnalystsVery helpful. Maybe if we could just move on to capital and profitability. You mentioned earlier, Hope, about the mid-teens ROTCE target hitting it a year early. You've also talked about CET1 moving down. It looks like you continue to buy back stock through the quarter, if I look at the 10-K. How do we think about the timing to hit the target, bearing any significant regulatory changes? And is this the right longer-term range to consider? Or is there ability to maybe bring it down further over time?
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesWell, first, thanks for reading our 10-K. We put a lot of time and energy into writing that thing. I'm glad at least one person read it and found value in it.
Michael Rose
AnalystsYes, well AI did. So...
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesI'm glad AI made it simpler for you. It's a long document to get through. When we are looking at our CET1, we're really looking out at where do we think the economy is going to go, what do we think the risk factors are and what do we second think loan growth is going to be that we hold top-tier capital for loan growth. That is our goal first and foremost. Second, we look at how do we deploy it for shareholders. We bought approximately $200 million of shares back this quarter. I wish we weren't doing it because had we had the 3%, 4%, 5% loan growth we were hoping for in the first quarter, we would have used it for that, but we are able to kind of flex in between is it loan growth or is it share buybacks right now. We announced a dividend increase in the first quarter as well as we're able to return excess capital to shareholders. We returned about $1.2 billion of capital last year to shareholders. So we really look at the 3 in lockstep. We finished last quarter at 10.6 as loan growth has been pretty flat quarter-over-quarter with mortgage warehouse seasonally paying down. I expect we'll end around that this quarter. We do have a longer-term or near-term target that our Board approved to get down to 10.5 this year. But that 10.5 is we want to get there with loan growth. And so as we see loan growth pick up, you'll start to see more loan growth, less share buybacks, but trade one for the other in your model every quarter.
Michael Rose
AnalystsWell, that said, you may get an opportunity to buy back some more today. So we'll see. Maybe one for you, Tom. Can you just walk us through the kind of the puts and takes on credit, maybe what has allowed you to post such great metrics kind of over time despite a lot of volatility over the past 5 years? And then how should we kind of think about normalization versus historical trends? We talked about AI and the customer diligence. Obviously, the diversification of the loan book is something that I think is still underappreciated for First Horizon. And obviously, the underwriting has gotten better, I think, too.
Thomas Hung
ExecutivesYes. No, I appreciate it. I think the puts and takes of credit at the end of the day, for me, I'm going to come back to the decentralized model that we have being close to our customers. Things don't always go according to plan. And we all know that. But when things it may deviate from expectations, being close to our customers, having that type of relationship and the focus on relationship lending we have, what that means is we're aware of things sooner. And the sooner you're aware of things, the better you can make course adjustments. And on top of that, the other theme that I mentioned is consistency. Regardless of what's happened in terms of all the twists and turns in the economy and unexpected events, we have always stayed very true to our underwriting principles that have proven out over time. And I think between that and diversification we have, that's how we've been able to consistently generate the results we have. We've talked a few times about the events of the last several days. And will that have an effect on credit depending on how long it lasts, I would say that's a fair estimate. But what gives me the confidence about our ability to perform through however this plays out is the fact that we also have that very well diversified book, as you mentioned, and that has served us well regardless of whether it was tariffs, whether it was COVID, whether it was disruption in the banking industry through many different events since we're diversified and we're disciplined in what we do, and we're very relationship focused and not transaction focused. Regardless of what's come at us, we have performed through all of that, and that's why I'm confident we'll do the same once again however this current Middle East situation plays out.
Michael Rose
AnalystsOne request we've gotten from a few people, one of which is in the audience is questions around data center exposure. I don't know if you guys have talked about that before, but if that's something you could discuss, but it is -- we've gotten some requests from clients for screens and things like that, and it's hard dated to get it.
Thomas Hung
ExecutivesYes. No, that's fair. I would just say we have very, very minimal exposure to data centers, software and that sector overall.
Michael Rose
AnalystsOkay. Perfect. We only got about 1.5 minutes left, so I've saved the best for last, but Hope maybe wanted to maybe talk now that we're about 2/3 of the way through the quarter. Just any updates to, broadly speaking, any of your guidance for the year and anything that is maybe a little bit better, a little bit slower. I think you touched on a few of those things, but would just love any updates.
Hope Dmuchowski
ExecutivesI would say fee income is holding up as we anticipated. Loan growth and deposit growth is definitely lagging coming into the year from where we thought the year would start. But we've seen this many years before. We've seen it pick up. The opportunity we have ahead of us is really a mortgage refi wave. We're sitting with a lot of arms on our books as well as the mortgage warehouse business benefiting from that. There was a small period last week where the 30-year dropped below 6%. I don't think it lasted very long. We didn't see many locks in that half a day. But depending on which way rates go, I do think one of the big upsides for us would be a refi, the opportunity for our clients to refi and mortgage warehouse to see that pick up. But I feel more and more confident every day that First Horizon is prepared for any economic situation that we will grow in line with what is healthy where can we continue to grow great long-term relationships that are profitable for us and shareholders. Long term, great to have Tom along with me talk about our disciplined credit underwriting so that we have confidence regardless of the economic cycle that the clients that we've had clients lessen with that we've chosen to put on our balance sheet are going to be there for the long term. We don't get them all right, but we are getting more of them right than most of our peers, which is the goal. Lending is not a zero risk business. But I feel a little uncertain in the last 4 days, but I feel like we've lived this. It was the RBC conference last year, we were at when the tariffs hit the middle of the conference, coming into your conference is the Iran conflict. So it seems like there's going to be an investment banking conference somewhere out there, then something unusual is going to happen that we don't quite have the update for yet, but a healthy U.S. economy will continue to move forward.
Michael Rose
AnalystsThat right. It's always in March. Well, thank you, Tom, Hope. I really appreciate it. Join me in thanking First Horizon.
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