Huntington Bancshares Incorporated (HBAN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
December 8, 2021
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Ryan Nash
analystFriends from for the regional banks. We are pleased to once again have Huntington joining us at the conference. Huntington has spent much of the recent months integrating the TCF acquisition by rationalizing costs, by also -- but also investing for growth. Additionally, it's continued to execute on its strategy of digitizing the bank across multiple areas, and it should be well positioned to generate positive operating leverage in the years ahead. Lastly, it's poised to benefit from improving loan demand given its leading middle market franchise. Here to tell us more about what's in store is Chairman, President and CEO, Steve Steinour. With that, I'm going to pass it over to Steve.
Stephen Steinour
executiveGood afternoon, and thank you, Ryan and Goldman Sachs for hosting us today. It's really great to be back in person today for the conference. So I want to welcome everyone, and we appreciate your interest in Huntington. Before we get started, please review Slide 2, which details forward-looking statements we'll make today. Let me begin with a few comments related to our strategy and recent initiatives, then I'll turn it back over to Ryan for a Q&A. So if we start on Slide 3, please. At the core of Huntington, we're a purpose-driven company. We seek to make people's lives better, help businesses thrive and strengthen the communities we serve. We're focused and investing in our vision to become the country's leading people-first, digitally powered bank. Looking out for people is the essence of our culture. This vision is supported by highly engaged colleagues, they're just terrific, who deliver great service to our customers every day; and our front-facing colleagues who strive to build lasting relationships. We'd not be able to achieve our success over the years without their commitment to our customers. As I meet with our colleagues across the bank, I can tell you that we have exceptional talent, which was further bolstered with the addition of remarkable colleagues who joined us from TCF. As we enter the final month of '21, I'm appreciative of their hard work and the accomplishments our team has achieved this year from integration and conversion activities to the continued execution of our organic growth strategies. Now as we approach '22, I see substantial opportunities in front of us and look forward to our colleagues continuing to acquire and deepen customer relationships. This purpose-driven performance supports our objectives to drive organic growth and deliver sustainable top quartile financial metrics. Slide 4 summarizes our key message points I want to cover today. First, we're closing out '21 with great momentum, having successfully executed on key initiatives, including delivering robust organic customer growth and the launch of compelling new products and services. Post conversion of TCF, we are now operating with one Huntington platform across the footprint, and we're bringing new and expanded capabilities to our customers as we speak. Secondly, we're very pleased to have successfully managed the TCF integration. One year ago -- less than 1 year ago, we announced the transaction. And since that time, we've both closed the acquisition and converted customers to the Huntington platform. The approvals and closing occurred very quickly by historical standards and conversion activities went extraordinarily well and rapidly, which is a testament to the expertise and experience of our integration teams. We finalized actions. We expect to deliver the full realization of cost savings early in '22, and we are increasingly focused on executing revenue synergy opportunities. Customer retention trends have been encouraging to date, and we're seeing early wins as we go to market with these new and expanded geographies and with a broader set of products and services. We've made investments in middle market, business banking, private banking and wealth to build out several of our new markets. Third, we're driving momentum in both commercial and consumer banking. As we close out the fourth quarter, we have colleagues focused on new and expanded relationship opportunities. Loan pipelines have continued to further strengthen, and we continue to see robust calling activities. Loan balances, excluding PPP, have increased quarter-to-date, and we're expecting strong new production levels in December to close out this year. We are confident of our outlook, and we expect loan growth to accelerate throughout '22. Fourth, our business strategies are set. We're driving positive outcomes. Huntington is well primed for sustained growth, especially within the commercial bank. Fifth and finally, we remain committed to delivering on our medium-term financial goals, including positive operating leverage as well as 17-plus percent return on tangible common equity. So moving to Slide 5. We had a very busy year, and our teams executed extraordinarily well as they did not lose sight of our organic growth strategies and initiatives while also delivering on a successful integration. This year, we built upon our Fair Play philosophy launched in 2010. And for over 10 years, Huntington has been consistently looking out for customers and leading the industry in this regard. This year, we launched new and compelling customer-friendly products and services such as Standby Cash and Early Pay. We continue to expand our teams and market coverage, including the expansion of our #1 in the nation SBA lending program and practice finance capabilities in addition to bringing auto finance to new states. In commercial banking, we expanded our industry specialization capabilities and continue to add talented bankers across teams and markets. We deployed a powerful digital analytics and relationship management tool, which is already driving results and increased engagement between bankers and their customers. So as a result of our strategies and initiatives, we continue to see robust organic new customer household growth, with consumer checking households growing at a 5% annualized rate year-to-date and business checking relationships growing at a 17 -- 7% annualized year-to-date growth rate. These are Huntington core statistics. These stats exclude the addition of TCF, which over time will support incremental new household growth as we bring Huntington's digital capabilities and our Fair Play philosophy to these customers and markets. Our success in '21 included the integration activities as a result of the TCF acquisition. The transaction added $46 billion of assets, making Huntington a top 10 regional bank in the U.S. It not only brought additional scale and density throughout Michigan, it added incremental capabilities with equipment finance, commercial real estate and inventory finance as well as added new growth markets in the Twin Cities in Denver. The growth markets provide a greenfield opportunity in Minnesota and Colorado in middle market and corporate banking. Additionally, we have cemented our #1 branch market density in Ohio and Michigan while roughly tripling our presence and customers in Chicago with more than $10 billion in deposits and now over 140 branches. Cost synergies from the acquisition are ahead of schedule and revenue synergies, we believe, will provide us with incremental top line revenue growth opportunities in the years ahead. During the year, we returned capital to shareholders via $500 million of share repurchases through the third quarter and announced a 3% increase to the quarterly common stock dividend. Credit continues to perform very well and remains a key tenant of management's approach to running the bank through the cycle. The acquired commercial loan portfolio has been re-underwritten with Huntington's risk ratings in place. Finally, we were honored to receive numerous accolades, which validate the strength and competitiveness of our products and services. These include J.D. Power having ranked us #1 in consumer banking within our region for customer satisfaction this year as it has for 6 of the last 9 years. Additionally, customer satisfaction for our mobile app ranked first among regional banks nationally for the third year in a row. Slide 6 gives an overview of our 5 primary businesses and associated strategies. In each of these areas, we see significant opportunities to continue to grow our businesses and acquire and deepen customer relationships, which supports our overall growth outlook as we enter '22. Today, I'd like to focus on commercial banking. Slide 7 highlights our strategic priorities within commercial banking. This segment comprises over 40% of total loan balances and represents one of the most exciting multiyear growth opportunities. Our go-to-market approach centers on a comprehensive set of offerings and capabilities that support clients spanning from middle market through corporate banking in addition to specialty commercial verticals, commercial real estate and equipment and inventory finance. Treasury management and capital markets capabilities support these businesses and provide compelling new revenue opportunities. The combination of our size, breadth and expertise across these areas brings tremendous potential. And as we're seeing strong performance, including equipment finance which nearly doubled in size with the addition of TCF, our equipment finance business now is the seventh largest bank-owned platform in the country. We've also added capabilities, including small ticket and vendor channels within equipment finance, as well as the addition of the second-largest inventory finance business in the country. In middle market, specialty and corporate banking, we see substantial growth opportunities. In middle market and corporate banking, we've added teams in new markets such as the Twin Cities in Denver, where that activity just did not exist under TCF. We've also bolstered our existing teams in Chicago and throughout Michigan. We've also expanded specialty banking, bringing expertise within focused industry verticals in areas such as health care, asset-based lending, franchise finance, tech and telecom. Our expanded capabilities allow us to up-tier with larger corporate clients. We've already seen several recent opportunities to leverage our team's expertise to capture incrementally more lead transactions. Our expanded capabilities allow us to provide more treasury management and capital markets products and services to our new and existing customers. In commercial real estate, our portfolio is well diversified across both geographies and sectors. We benefit from experienced leadership in the business with expertise in several focused sectors such as industrial, warehouse and multifamily. We've also recently established a REIT team. Our treasury management and capital markets businesses continue to grow at a healthy -- at healthy clips driven by the expansion of the core commercial banking sectors. Capital markets revenue was up 14% year-to-date versus last year with the team executing very well, and that's core Huntington. The activity levels during the month of November represented the strongest performance we've seen for a mid-quarter month and reflect the level of transaction volumes across the commercial bank. Treasury management revenues were up 17% year-to-date versus last year, again, very substantially core Huntington. And this growth reflects our continued initiatives to grow our share of wallet and further deepen our relationships with commercial customers and provide them with solutions to reduce pain points and improve efficiency. Finally, Slide 8 shares our medium-term financial goals. And we believe these represent a compelling set of financial metrics, including delivering positive operating leverage and top quartile return on capital. And we expect to deliver this performance during the second half of '22, and we intend to drive substantial value creation for shareholders that is not reflected in our valuation today. I'll read that again. We intend to drive substantial value creation for shareholders that's not reflected in our valuation today. Huntington colleagues and Board are a top 10 shareholder. We have tremendous motivation to drive this to success. We have line of sight to realize the total cost savings we announced, with the majority of actions already completed. And our businesses are positioned to enter the year with momentum and good pipelines. Some of our loan portfolios and outstanding line facilities such as dealer floor plan and inventory finance represent a coiled spring of potential loan growth for us. So we're increasingly confident about our outlook for '22 with accelerating loan growth, new customer acquisition and cross-sell efforts, which are fully aligned, fully aligned, and already underway post the TCF conversion. So thank you for your interest. We're going to turn it over to Ryan for some Q&A now.
Ryan Nash
analystGreat. And thank you for the presentation, Steve. So a lot of good stuff in there that we're going to touch upon. But I wanted to kind of just kick it off big picture. We've spent most of the last 2 years managing through the pandemic. And it feels like we're shifting more -- back more towards a more normal environment. And for you, the focus has obviously been largely on the integration, although you continue to attract talent and focus on growing. So as you sit here today, can you just talk about how you feel the bank is positioned to succeed into 2022?
Stephen Steinour
executiveSo I love the positioning that we have as we go into '22. First of all, we've got the largest merger -- acquisition in our history complete in terms of the technology. We've got our teams now on one platform. We're a top 10 regional bank. We've got scale to the businesses. So like the -- all of that coming together is very important. Now we still have integration work. We've got a lot of colleagues, many of whom are working remotely to make sure that we further align around our objectives and our culture, but we are very well positioned. We have scale with the size of the bank today. We're investing and continuing to invest significantly in technology, principally digital technology, and we have wonderful new lines of businesses. And probably most importantly, we've got a great set of new colleagues that have bolstered and strengthened Huntington as we go forward. So we see the momentum building this quarter. We're through the conversion. Like what we see. The alignment of our product and services with the consumer teams, the business banking teams, what we're able to do with our SBA production. And we have now officers producing SBA loans in Colorado and Minnesota, which was a new endeavor. We've got the teams largely in place in middle market banking. And we have a great new team, a large team, with us on wealth and private banking in Minnesota. So it's coming together. We've been investing in these revenue-generating capabilities throughout the year.
Ryan Nash
analystSo Steve, you mentioned some of the newer expansion markets, Denver and Minneapolis to name a few, that are scaling up right now. Can you maybe just talk about what are your expectations for a market like these? And then can these things move the needle in terms of the growth profile of the bank over time?
Stephen Steinour
executiveWe think they can because these are greenfield opportunities that you specifically referenced. They didn't exist pre-acquisition. And they're wonderful markets. Twin Cities is 4 million people MSA. Denver is 3 million. So they're equivalent size to what we see in Columbus and Detroit, and we've been able to do really well in those markets and expect to continue to do so. And the early on investments, the quality of the people we've been able to attract, our new colleagues and their early on success is very, very encouraging. Over time, we'll scale these businesses.
Ryan Nash
analystSo Steve, the company seems highly focused or laser-focused on organic growth. And you've laid out a handful of strategic organic priorities across consumer. You just showed us what you're doing in commercial. And you've also talked in the past about wealth and payments. I guess which of these are the most -- are you the most excited about, if not all of them? And can you provide some color on how you plan to execute on a handful of these over the next period of time?
Stephen Steinour
executiveSo let's talk about a number of them because I find many of these very exciting. So on the commercial side, the capital markets business for us within the TCF business lines is almost completely new. I think the only product offered was derivatives to commercial real estate. So it's a wide open play for foreign exchange, IS&T, commodities, a host of things that we do well on the capital market side. The treasury management activity was good but fairly light in terms of product and services. So we have a much bigger menu of capabilities that we can bring to the customer base. And we've got, for example, 450,000-plus small businesses, and 150,000 of them came to us from TCF and there's a huge opportunity around penetrating those. On the commercial side, we are really dense now in Michigan. We have great scale throughout Michigan. And we've got these greenfield opportunities in Colorado and importantly, the Twin Cities. Nothing but upside in those areas, and they'll have full cross-sell. On the consumer side, our products are industry-leading. And so our consumer bankers, our branch colleagues, they're in a position to do things they've never been able to do. And we're supporting them with brand investments and other investments to build awareness, to build on our brand as we go forward. I think all of these are huge opportunities. TCF didn't have its own credit card. We do. TCF outsourced broker-dealer. We don't. So we have just this wonderful set of broad capabilities. And I think we've got several years of just focused execution and revenue growth that we'll be able to drive even further and faster as a consequence of this acquisition.
Ryan Nash
analystJust taking -- jotting down the note. So in the appendix, you have a slide talking about revenue synergy opportunities that you hope to drive across commercial, layering on your product suite, wealth private banking and of course, inventory and equipment finance. When can investors start to expect to see the benefits from these revenue synergies to materialize? And how big do you expect them to be? And then second, have you seen early signs of progress that gives you confidence on these revenue opportunities?
Stephen Steinour
executiveSo in reverse order, we have seen -- we've closed middle market loans. Now in Colorado and in the Twin Cities, we've got success on the wealth management front. Our SBA teams are going really strong in those de novo markets. So across the board, we're seeing early encouraging signs, and we've got great new colleagues from TCF, but also others who joined us in these areas to work with going forward. I think you'll start to see -- have visibility that we'll break out in the first quarter. We'll anecdotally pick up references when we do year-end earnings. But it's very encouraging. Pipelines are clearly building. Activity is good. Leadership there in these markets is very strong. And then we are a force in Michigan on a combined basis. We have #1 branch share. We've closed 200 of them and #1 by a lot. So physical presence is really important for a small business as well as consumers. It helps with middle market as well. And so we've just got a great combined team in Michigan and expect to grow and do very well there. And Chicago is more than a tripling of our branch, our physical presence. And with 30 points -- 30 branches, we never tried to execute the full play. The 140 branches, we were going after the full play. Now it's a competitive market. But each of these have opportunities for us, and we're excited to be able to go after it. Our commercial real estate, very large, seventh largest equipment finance bank on company. And there's a lot more CapEx that I think we'll see in '22, '23 going forward as we try as a country to deal with the labor shortage in these different industries. So I think we're very well positioned, almost have like a spring with the inventory finance and dealer floor plan activities. Both of these are a couple $2.5 billion light from where they typically would be an outstanding. So at some point, the supply chain resolutions will come our way and sort of bounce those volumes back.
Ryan Nash
analystI wanted to talk to and hear a little bit about technology and tech investing. You made a comment before about substantial value, which we'll talk about later. But I know one of the knocks from investors earlier in the year was you guys did ramp up investments early in the year, and that resulted in some higher costs. But you've clearly made a number of big investments both on the business side and the consumer side, but particularly on the consumer side. And maybe as the first question, can you maybe just elaborate on the success of the investments that you've made? Maybe just outline a couple of them. And what do you think it means for the growth and the efficiency of the organization?
Stephen Steinour
executiveSo I think the pandemic accelerated digital in a very significant way. I think it accelerated our plans by 3 to 5 years in terms of building out. And what we chose to do is drive a fairly rapid expansion so that we had digital capabilities and teams oriented towards each of our major business lines. And on the consumer side, that has meant more and more activity that's coming into us digitally. Right now, about half of our customers come to us digitally. Around 95% of our mortgages are either originated digitally or are digitally assisted. We're a very large home equity lender, #4 in the country. That, too, will get a digital origination or assist. So these investments have paybacks already. Now as we start to do more end-to-end, we'll take out some of the pain points for our customers, and that will involve more transparency, easier to do business with. And think of it like an airline ticket that years ago used to go to a counter, a kiosk before and today, it's on a phone. That will become available to our customers increasingly as we move forward over the next couple of years. We are already almost end-to-end or end-to-end on our indirect auto business. We've taken out the middle layer of data input. We've saved about 6.5 minutes per loan of data input by doing that and have harvested economics. You'll see more and more of that consumer, business banking, commercial as we go forward. And it'll result in a better customer experience and frankly, I think a better colleague experience as well.
Ryan Nash
analystMaybe just to follow up, as you are planning for next year, what are you prioritizing in terms of tech investments, whether it's the tech stack, specific capabilities or improving the overall client experience? Obviously, you noted a handful of things that you're expecting, but what about the broader part of the base?
Stephen Steinour
executiveWell, the significant emphasis from us is digital. On the tech stack itself, we've got one core app we're changing out. It's a commercial loan system. It'll go from mainframe to cloud. It's called AFSVision, and we'll complete that roughly third quarter of next year. And that's the only significant name frame app that will change out. The core stack in relatively good shape. We were able to do the TCF combination without any sort of incremental effort. You just got to add CPU and things like that to it. So we like the investments we've made over time in the forward stack. We've been working for years to bring some of the mainframe core app, particularly in deposits, into a higher level of middleware for API convenience and other things make good progress. We'll continue with that. But there's not a significant new core level of effort that we're anticipating over the next few years.
Ryan Nash
analystAnd maybe just lastly, you referenced you made a lot of digital investments. I know you've given slides with some stats. But what has all this meant for customer engagement, retention and also customer acquisition? And what is left to do on the digital side?
Stephen Steinour
executiveWell, there's more to do and more ideas around product and unique product and service that we'll continue to do across each of the business lines. We see a lot of opportunity working from where we are. But we have great capabilities on the consumer side. We're accelerating into business into commercial as we build out. So again, about half of our consumer deposit accounts now are digital. That number will only increase. More than half of our deposits are digital and ATM. That will increase. So our economics off digital versus an in-person transaction are remarkably different. And that's afforded us the opportunity to do another 62-branch consolidations in February of '22 and set us up to deal with the inflation that we see and the other opportunities to move the company even further faster on the digital side.
Ryan Nash
analystSpeaking of the brand savings, obviously, that will help offset some of the risks of inflation, as you articulated. And you talked a little bit about the merger. Can you just give us an update on, one, how we're progressing? And then you have a history of successfully executing on rationalizing costs. I think you're slated to take out $490 million. Could there be any potential areas of upside? Maybe just give us an update on how the cost saves are progressing. And what could be some areas [indiscernible]?
Stephen Steinour
executiveWe have a very clear line of sight on the cost saves that we announced. So that's a given. That will happen. But in addition, as we talked about on the second quarter earnings, we were concerned about inflation coming into the environment for the first time in many, many years. And so we took another round of expense actions to give us a cushion to deal with wage increases as we go into '22. Our expense outlook is inclusive of what we're doing on the wage side as well as some incremental marketing and other things. So 62 branches, it'll close first weekend in February. We adjusted our org structure and eliminated a number of jobs as a consequence, and that will fund the inflation adjustments that we're making as well as position us to move forward. So our expense outlook is -- fourth quarter expense decline off third quarter. First quarter, a further reduction. Second quarter, a further reduction, getting close to a plateau. We gave you roughly $1 billion to think of where that second quarter anchor would be. But this is why we're still investing in -- incrementally in digital and our businesses to build them out to the potential that we see. And that's all reflected in that expense outlook.
Ryan Nash
analystSo there's clearly -- it sounds like there's a ton of business momentum heading into 2022. Maybe before we change the year you can give us a quick update on 4Q. I think you mentioned that you're seeing loan growth improving sequentially. And I know there was a lot of other guidance, NIM being stable, expenses declining. I think Zach is in the double-digit range. Just high level, how are things progressing relative to your expectation?
Stephen Steinour
executiveWe like what we've seen in the first couple of months. And we're a large equipment finance lender, and that typically is a very large fourth quarter. We've done a lot. We have yet a substantial amount to do over the next weeks as we typically do. But given the scale of the combined operation, it's really busy and like that. Importantly for us, we generally see it trending down of our pipeline. We're getting things closed and then we got to start the year replenished. That's not the case now. Pipeline continues to be very strong as we approach the first quarter. Thus the outlook -- the confidence in the outlook that we're conveying today.
Ryan Nash
analystSo Steve, on that point, pipeline is obviously being robust and staying there, I'm sure you're out speaking with lots of CEOs across many industries in the footprint. What is the mood like across the customer -- your client base? What's top of mind? I'm assuming they're talking about managing through the supply chain and returning to the office. And what do you think all this is going to mean for their borrowing needs in the context of -- you're expecting long run to accelerate into next year?
Stephen Steinour
executiveWell, I think this is great for the industry and certainly, we hope for us. But you have a situation where there's a labor demand/supply imbalance. That's going to translate to CapEx. Again, that plays to our sweet spot. We have these supply chain bottlenecks. We're the second largest inventory finance company in the country. That plays to our strength because I think we're going to go from just in time to at least some days of inventory on hand to avoid these shutdowns and disruptions that are occurring. These will trend over the next couple of years. But that means, again, wind at our back as we move forward. I think the inflation factor is real and is going to be with us for a while on the wage front, and that should mean interest rate change is also positive for us. So we're coming into the year with a combined great set of colleagues. We've got momentum. We've got a single set of platforms. We're focused on execution. We've been able to do that. We will drive operating efficiency for sure in '22, but we're committing to that beyond. We'll get to that 17-plus ROTCE in the second half of next year. Like the positioning as -- a lot as we go into next year.
Ryan Nash
analystMaybe one to round up on loan growth. We've talked pretty broadly about the expectation for an improvement. How are you thinking about a commercial versus consumer? And what categories do you expect to be some of the biggest drivers of growth? And where could there be slowdowns?
Stephen Steinour
executiveWell, I think the commercial side generally has lots of opportunity, and we've got this -- we've not budgeted. We're not forecasting a change in dealer floor plan inventories or the inventory finance business sort of springing back. We don't know if that will happen in '22. The auto OEMs are saying maybe second half. We've moved it into '23 sort of outlook. So the core performance I'm referencing is not dependent on that or rate outlook. And as we've done in the past, we'll adjust expenses to meet the operating environment we see as we go through the year. But business line momentum is across the board. It's really good. And the commercial side, I think, will be a leader. Our consumer colleagues have been outstanding. They've got 6 out of 9 years with J.D. Power, #1. The other 3 years, I think we were #2. So we have a lot of engaged colleagues executing well every day. We're trying to bring our new colleagues from TCF in alignment with us. We've got work to do there. There's pandemic. Having people in remote settings makes it more difficult to connect. We'll work on that throughout the year and come out, I hope, with a very strong cultural alignment as we go through '22.
Ryan Nash
analystA couple of last questions in the last few minutes here, Steve. You're in the process of taking the Fair Play product and converting it to the TCF customer base, which I think is -- you expected a little bit of a step down in fees but obviously should be good for the customer experience. And so can you maybe talk about what the early feedback has been from this? How big of an opportunity this can be to accelerate both customer growth and to reduce attrition across the footprint?
Stephen Steinour
executiveWell, our branch colleagues love it, right? This is -- I mean, we're doing so much for colleague -- for our customers, right? 24-Hour Grace, all day deposit, $50 Safety Zone, Standby Cash, Early Pay, these are things -- all are new. Our core product is new and better, Asterisk-Free Checking, Huntington 5 and 25. So we've got a lot of enthusiasm in our branch team, our consumer team. And our customers will, of course, appreciate it. So what that does is fuel further acquisition. We tend to be industry-leading in terms of customer checking acquisition at a household level or business year in, year out or close to it. And so we swim through -- when we do a step-down and Fair Play will be a step-down in the first quarter for some of these fees, the customer acquisition rates will overcome it roughly in 1 year, 1.5 years.
Ryan Nash
analystI want to make sure I ask you this question if we have time for another one after this. But you made a statement that you think substantial value is not reflected in your valuation. I'm curious, why do you believe that is the case? And what do you think the drivers of that are?
Stephen Steinour
executiveWell, I think any time you do a larger acquisition, there's a prove it moment. Can you get the expenses? Can you do it -- can you get approval right now, right? So you have a series of show-me moments. And even though we didn't talk about revenue synergies specifically at an announcement a year ago, we alluded to them, and now we've got to deliver them. And delivering them will do that, will create the returns and the -- what I think is a compelling valuation. We've got a very high dividend payout rate, and we just increased that in the third quarter. So like the position we're playing from. But if I were an investor, I might say, well, prove it. If I'm a quant, I'd be caught up in 4 quarters of analysis that didn't take out onetime or other expenses. And so you've got a very unique -- you got to -- we're in a very unique moment. We saw this a little bit with FirstMerit, and it took about 18 months to sort of swim through it and demonstrate we were able to do what we said we were going to do. And I think we're caught up in some of that right now. It's a momentum. The momentum will shift here. We've got to deliver the goods and the momentum will shift and the valuation will lift.
Ryan Nash
analystMaybe one last thing I want to come back to and hopefully, this won't be too long of a question. You talked about not assuming dealer floor plan normalizes next year. Obviously, there's other businesses, equipment finance and inventory finance. How are you feeling about the ability for these businesses? And you used the phrase coiled spring and that sounded intriguing to me. How big a driver can these things be in the short to intermediate term?
Stephen Steinour
executiveThese are great tailwinds for us because they will happen, I think, and they'll buoy what we're communicating organically. And so those are pretty big lifts. If we get both of them in a 6- or 12-month period of time, that's a really positive and significant lift for us.
Ryan Nash
analystFantastic. Well, we're in overtime here so I just want to say thanks to Steve and the team.
Stephen Steinour
executivePleasure, Ryan. Thank you.
Ryan Nash
analystThank you.
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