Huntington Bancshares Incorporated (HBAN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Let me just join you -- Venkat's comments from earlier just welcoming everyone to our 23rd Annual Global Financial Services Conference. I'm very pleased you could all make it. I can't take -- I can't miss this opportunity in the back is our kind of updated marketing deck and posters. So please make sure to grab them at some point over the next 3 days. We're very pleased to have kicking off our kind of company sessions, Huntington Bancshares to start it off from the company, we have Zach Wasserman, Chief Financial Officer; Brant Standridge, who runs Consumer and Regional Banking. They're going to start off with a few prepared remarks. I'm not sure if you saw they posted some slides earlier this morning, and then we're going to jump right into Q&A. As they kind of come up here, I just like to put up the first ARS question. What we're going to have throughout the 3 days in the conference, and we've done this every year since 2012 is just put up questions in front of you, you should have kind of clickers. They look like the 1998 BlackBerry's to answer these. We'll compile the data, publish it at the end. The first question is the same for every company. What is your current position in the shares and then you characterize your positioning. We look at how that evolved over time as well as kind of rank the banks at the end. So it's pretty neat. And then throughout our conversation, we're going to pull up questions to kind of pull the audience and kind of get management's reactions when appropriate, kind of in real time to the extent that it maybe differs from the current market view is. So I'll pull up there, hand over to these guys, and then we'll move back.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today, and thank you, Jason and Barclays, for hosting us. I'm pleased to share an update on Huntington's accomplishments in the third quarter and detail our progress toward our goals that we articulated at our Investor Day in February. Before we get started, please review Slide 2 and 3, which applied to forward statements we will make today. Beginning on Slide 4, there are 4 key messages I want to share with you today. First, we continue to execute on our growth strategy, which remains primarily oriented toward organic initiatives in both our core and new markets. To accomplish this, we implement a proven playbook that enables us to deliver national scale products and capabilities in a localized manner in our regions with outstanding results. Second, we're driving strong profit growth from our combination of revenue expansion and positive operating leverage. Third, strong credit quality remains a hallmark of Huntington. Our growth is occurring within our long-standing risk framework. And fourth, we are well positioned for outperformance through a range of economic conditions and interest rate environments by virtue of our disciplined approach to capital, liquidity and credit management. Moving on to Slide 5. Over the past 5 quarters, we've consistently delivered peer-leading loan and deposit growth, and we've expanded our key fee income streams while delivering positive operating leverage. Through the second quarter of this year, cumulative loan growth was 7.9% or 7 percentage points better than the peer median. In fact, quarter-to-date loan growth is tracking even better than we had expected with $2.3 billion of net loan growth as of the end of last month. NIM in Q3 is also performing very well and above our prior expectations, now trending at around 310 basis points or even higher for the third quarter and around a similar level for the fourth quarter. Our balance sheet remains relatively neutral to changes in the interest rate environment, and we expect NIM not only to trend with a stable trend in the back half of this year, but to then rise into 2026 and 2027, mainly driven by continued benefits from fixed asset repricing and the general upward sloping nature of the yield curve and how it's evolving. This asset growth and resilient NIM is translating into strong spread revenue growth, and we expect this momentum to continue through the rest of the year and into 2026. We are also advancing a key priority by expanding our payments, wealth and capital markets fee businesses. These areas are growing robustly, powering solid overall fee income expansion, and we're accomplishing this while sustaining positive operating leverage. We remain focused on our expense management approach, which is centered on delivering positive operating leverage, supported by sustained reengineering of baseline operating costs that creates outsized capacity to invest in revenue growth initiatives. We're on pace to deliver stronger operating leverage in 2025 than we had originally anticipated coming into this year. Turning to Slide 6. Since 2023, our core franchise has been the engine that drives our growth. We're relentless in focus on growing primary bank customers, deepening our relationships with them over time, and continuing to win in the markets in which we have a strong legacy presence. Within our core over the last 2 years, we have substantially increased our corporate, middle market and consumer customers while expanding the breadth of the value-added services we provide them in areas like payments, wealth management and capital markets. This success is evidenced in our outstanding consumer and business banking household growth and peer-leading loan and deposit growth. This operating and financial performance has enabled us to pursue strategic expansion opportunities from a position of strength. I'd like to invite now Brant up to the stage to discuss our model for new market growth.

Thank you, Zach, and Jason, thank you so much for having us. Turning to Slide 7. As Zach just articulated, our position of strength allows us to opportunistically invest in new initiatives. These initiatives take 2 forms. First, we've intentionally grown by adding several new national verticals. This expansion has increased the breadth of expertise available to our existing customers and expanded our reach to new markets and customers. Second, we've entered new geographies, notably North and South Carolina and Texas. As we entered these new geographies, we've leveraged the foundation created through our national specialty verticals and added locally focused teams, starting with middle market and regional banking. We believe local colleagues with local relationships integrated with national expertise is valued by customers. And I want to take a moment and double-click over the next few slides into our unique and differentiated regional banking business model. Turning to Slide 8. The essential component of our approach is what we have fashioned our regional bank model to deliver. Local relationships, leveraging local relationships. This value proposition is a powerful competitive differentiator, while many banks have shifted towards specialty or vertical alignment, we've distinguished ourselves by delivering the full Huntington franchise through our trusted local bankers, creating a more holistic and personalized customer experience. In early 2023, we enhanced our local approach and combined our business bank with the lower middle market, creating a new regional bank segment that covers all business customers under $50 million in revenue, which, as you all know, make up the large majority of businesses in a market. Bottom line, we have the products and expertise of a large national bank, but deliver those through local relationships as an integrated team with the service and attention of a local community bank. Turning to Slide 9. Leading this effort, we've assigned regional presidents for our 12 regions and empower them with the enhanced decision-making capabilities and comprehensive P&L accountability. The regional president is responsible for integrating all the lines of business located within a region. This model brings us closer to the customer, differentiates us through greater focus on local, and creates alignment that enables us to go to market as one Huntington team, bringing all the key products and services to bear in a highly coordinated manner for each of our customers. We've also continued to invest in building deeper expertise across specialty verticals. These national commercial specialty verticals and our local teams complement each other. The expertise that the specialty teams provide enhance our value to locally managed customers and the scale of our local teams create a deeper market opportunity for our specialties. Turning to Slide 10. When we're establishing a new regional market, we have a two-phase approach. We lead the expansion with our commercial bank and specialty business lines, recruiting talented bankers and credit risk leaders with long tenure and deep local relationships. This approach ensures we have a good client selection aligned to our risk parameters. It also creates an investment profile that drives a quick path to profitability. In fact, we achieved profitability within the first year of both our middle market launches in North and South Carolina as well as Texas. Our success with our commercial and specialty business builds the local leadership and brand recognition that supports the opportunity to further expand with the rollout of the complete Huntington franchise, including our consumer business and the build-out of a branch network. Turning to Slide 11. Perhaps the most powerful feature of this model is the fact that we've successfully implemented across our regions at scale. This has proven to be a value proposition for our customers across all geographies. And the proof points are everywhere. Across our footprint, we're seeing solid continued growth in established core markets where we have deeply embedded local presence and enjoy high density. We've also driven excellent share gains with the newer core markets that came to us in the TCF acquisition and where we continue to expand rapidly and capture the revenue growth synergies we had expected. And as we have discussed, we are driving excellent early results from the growth initiatives in our expansion markets. In North and South Carolina, our model has created a foundation from which we have launched our full franchise. We've already opened the first 3 of the 55 branches we plan to open, and our early results are very promising. In Texas, our local middle market initiative has been doing exceptionally well. The acquisition of Veritex lines up perfectly with our focus on Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. It significantly advances our build-out in those markets and provides a springboard for accelerating growth in Texas over the next several years. Importantly, the regional bank model that I described earlier makes it seamless for us to integrate Veritex into Huntington. We will create 2 new regions in Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston and the opening -- and our operating approach there will be aligned to the way we go to market in other Huntington geographies. Turning to Slide 12 and to wrap up, we, as a management team, have been relentlessly focused on driving growth in both core and expansion markets, scaling our commercial verticals and deepening customer relationships. Our regional banking model enables us to deliver national capabilities locally and our disciplined approach ensures we're building a durable, high-performing franchise that is managed within our aggregate moderate to low risk appetite and existing credit policies. We are energized by the opportunities ahead and confident in our ability to deliver sustained value for our customers, colleagues and shareholders. And with that, let me turn it to Jason for Q&A.

Thanks, guys. Pretty informative. Maybe we just start big picture. You mentioned kind of this unique model you have. Just maybe talk to kind of what's different about your model that allows you to outgrow peers. You showed that loan growth chart, clearly has outpaced the industry. And at the same time, your credit quality metrics have been probably better than the industry. So maybe just talk to that and I guess, how comfortable can we be that you're putting on this loan growth, and we're not going to see degradation looking out?

Sure. I'll kick that off and then Brant will tack on. I think first and foremost, it starts in the foundational way that we run the business, which is to always be in a position of strength from a credit perspective, having a very intentionally diversified portfolio, a very rigorous upfront client selection and an ongoing portfolio management approach. Secondly, in terms of liquidity to make the foundational core deposit engine, a critical element of the strategy and always focus on the strength of liquidity, having the highest insured deposit level of any large bank, having one of the best liquidity profiles of any large bank. And then capital to always ensure that we've got the capital to support our customers, and then capture new growth opportunities. We argument that with a rigor and a discipline with how we manage the company where we're holding accountability, having strong line of sight to how these new initiatives are going. And then lastly, as we've said all along, we're focused on driving strong performance in the core. And then when we have opportunistically the opportunity to capture a new growth opportunity, we only do that when we know that the team is ready to execute when they've got deep local knowledge and expertise of that segment of the geography, and when we're prepared to execute in that business the same as we execute across the rest of our business.

Jason, it's a great question, and it starts with the right bankers. And this model really allows the bankers who've supported relationships for many years to continue to be the central point for those relationships. And that's frankly, very attractive to those senior bankers. And so in each of these markets that we've entered with these new initiatives, we've done so with very, very experienced bankers who know their customers, know the markets. We've also been able to attract very senior local credit professionals. Those credit professionals that are then supported through our more central credit organization know the market, know the individual customers and allow us to manage risk within our stated risk appetite. So those things combined really give us a lot of confidence that we can continue to grow with this model, but do so in a way that is very prudent and in keeping with where our company has been for many, many years.

I guess, Brant, you touched on it in your presentation, but last year at this conference, you guys' kind of announced for the first time your expansion to the Carolinas with branches. Just maybe update us further on your progress there.

Well, it's going quite well. The branch build-out is -- has been very successful. We've opened it, as I mentioned earlier, the first 3 of those locations. We have a couple of more opening this year. We've actually secured the vast majority of the sites already. We'll have a very large and significant opening year next year, but we've also continued to build out the entire franchise. We've added capabilities from a mortgage and home lending perspective. We've added capabilities from a wealth perspective. We've expanded the size of the regional banking platforms there. And the reception that we've received from the market has been quite positive. It is a clear symbol to the market that we're there to invest and that we'll be there. And when you combine that with the work that we've been doing from a marketing perspective to share the Huntington story with the marketplace, we're very pleased with our progress thus far.

Maybe to put up the next ARS question, is just thoughts on -- the audience's thoughts on the Veritex acquisition. And Brant, maybe just ask you, just how just is that deal kind of fit into the broader picture of Huntington's kind of growth strategy? Does it prohibit you from doing additional deals? Kind of what's your thoughts on that strategy? And then is an early 4Q close still on the table?

So we -- first of all, we remain very, very committed that our primary strategy is organic growth. When you look at Texas, and obviously, this group knows how important that market is, how fast it's growing and also how significant and large it is. the acquisition of Veritex really is a springboard for our organic growth in the state of Texas. As I mentioned earlier, we had already launched there from a middle market perspective. We've had a number of our specialty businesses that have been in Texas for a number of years. And Veritex now gives us a significant share in the Dallas market, a real foothold in the Houston market, a list of really fantastic customers that we can now bring the entire franchise to. And so we view it really as a springboard for what would be a very strong organic opportunity in Texas.

And then I guess, 4Q close seemed, I guess, one of the -- an announcement seem kind of quick relative to what maybe we saw in other administrations. Just thoughts around that.

We feel confident that we could potentially have an early 4Q close.

Sounds good. I guess you mentioned marketing in your kind of other answer. And maybe a couple of weeks ago, Huntington put an announcement basically a brand relaunch, so to speak. Just how does that fit into the strategy? How do you measure that? Any kind of early signs of success?

Well, interestingly, we shared this at Investor Day, but one of the things the company has developed over really the last decade is a strong capability in performance or acquisition marketing. In fact, last quarter, 51% of our new consumer households are acquired digitally and a lot of that's driven through marketing. So that marketing is most successful in the places where we have high levels of awareness. One of the things that we've been doing over the last couple of years is how do we expand our awareness in markets that were newer like Colorado, like Chicago, like Minnesota and now like the new expansion markets. And so we're doing more with broad reach marketing. You know just last year, we made the announcement that we would name the Cleveland Browns Stadium. That was obviously a small investment in our broader reach marketing. We've done a number of things in North and South Carolina and also Colorado to expand our awareness there in ways that are very unique to the market. We had not updated our visual identity in 14 years, and so there was an opportunity for us to do that. We added the word bank to our name as we think about expanding into newer markets. We also have launched a new brand campaign that is shot in a very modularized fashion. This allows us to take the same spot and make it much, much more local, which is not only just central to our strategy, but an advantage from a marketing perspective. We've begun to see really positive early results from that. Our aided and unaided awareness in Colorado and Chicago and the Carolinas has climbed steadily, and then that translates into a significant growth in acquisition. The month of July for us was the best month from an acquisition that we've had in our consumer acquisition in over 10 years. And so we're really pleased with the work that we're doing and how our marketing efforts are really translating into more customers.

All right, Zach. Now we have to get into the financials. Maybe I'll usually don't start here. I'm going to start with expenses just because more recently, that's kind of been a big topic on investors' minds. And we talked about branch expansion. We talked about rebranding organic growth. Obviously, all that does require expenses. Maybe talk about how you intend to kind of further scale organic investments. You've talked about positive operating leverage a bit at Investor Day and others -- other forums and just how you're thinking about that, particularly as we enter kind of the 2026 budgeting season?

Sure. It's an area that we've spent a lot of time focusing on. And the model for our expense management approach is very clear and foundational to the way we operate the company. First and foremost, as I noted in my prepared remarks, we drive for systematic reengineering, ongoing sustainable reductions in baseline operating costs. Over the last 5 years, we've taken out each year, roughly 1% incremental out of the cost base through automation and a lot of other foundational reengineering capabilities. That allows us to, second, to plow that back into investments. And if you think about the offensive categories of expenses, digital technology development, marketing of the nature that Brant just highlighted and then the ability to add new people to go and drive these new growth initiatives, that is incredibly foundational capability. And then third that we manage the total amount of expenses, both the baseline and these investments to be growing less than revenue. And the last 5 years is a great -- last 3 years is a great example of that. We've been growing overall expenses at about 5%, less than the growth rate of revenue, but investments within that are growing between 20% and 25%. And so when you see 10% revenue growth, there's a linkage to that, that makes a lot of sense. Ultimately, what we want to do is drive sustainable expansion and positive operating leverage and really support the profit engine of the business. And this year is a great example. As I noted, we're seeing faster revenue growth this year, but also wider operating margin even as investments are also somewhat higher as we stand today versus our original budget.

And I guess you talked about in July, 5% to 6% expense growth for this year.

Yes. Very confident in that. And I think we'll see revenue growth, obviously well north of that.

All right. And then we talked about loan growth a bit. You show certainly good average loan growth quarter-to-date. I guess better than the guidance you gave last quarter. I think we're thinking 1% growth. You talked to for third quarter, it's closer to 2%. Maybe just talk about kind of your expectations in the back half of the year into 2026 loan growth.

Seeing the loan growth continue to be power, solid and sustained expansion, and it's quite broad-based. About -- through the first half of the year, we saw about 60% of the growth from our core businesses, 40% from a lot of the new initiatives that Brant highlighted during his presentation. That's where we're continue to see that mix power into Q3, somewhere between 1.5% and 2% sequential growth into the third quarter. Pipelines for the fourth quarter continue to look very good. Q4 is typically a seasonal high for Huntington in terms of loan production, and everything seems to be shaping up to see another solid amount of sequential growth into Q4. We're not giving formal guidance for 2026 at this point, but my working assumption is somewhere between 1% and 2% sequential growth on a quarterly basis as we go into next year.

Interesting because your guidance, I guess, for loan growth for the full year in July was 6% to 8%. You've already done 7% if I just take through August, and you're looking for more growth into the fourth quarter.

Clearly, Jason, we're setting ourselves up to be able to increase guidance as we go into our earnings call. So stay tuned. But in all seriousness, it's performing quite well. I think we'll be sort of at the high end, if not above those ranges.

And I guess when you look at kind of the loan growth relative to the guidance, I guess any particular pockets of surprising strength.

I don't know if you want to comment.

No, it's across the board. I mean we're seeing in our core markets, the capabilities that we've built with the national specialties allow us to do more for our existing customers. And then the new initiatives, whether it's the national expansion of some of these verticals or the new geographies North and South Carolina and Texas really provide a significant growth opportunity as well. So we believe we can continue to grow substantially with the capabilities we've continued to build, and it's broad-based across the board.

Maybe shift gears to NIM. Zach, you mentioned, I think 3.10% for the third quarter when we last spoke in July, you were saying 3.08% to 3.10%, so a little bit better than that. Maybe just talk to how you're thinking about funding costs, deposit betas, the Fed, I'm told is going to cut next week. And just kind of where do you see the NIM playing out?

Yes. So I think as I noted, seeing a very strong performance in NIM for the third quarter coming in about the same as last quarter, which was 3.11%, somewhere between 3.10%, 3.11% this quarter, we see about that same result again in Q4 and then rising NIMs into 2026, rising further into 2027. So it's setting up to have a nice, continued margin expansion for us. And in the near term, the primary source of outperformance relative to even our own internal thinking for this quarter has been deposit pricing. The teams are performing exceptionally well, continuing to drive out cost of funding. And even as we also continue to grow deposits, we'll see deposits grow this quarter and we feel pretty good about how the deposit growth trend will trend over the next number of quarters as well. So we're seeing very strong fundamental performance across the board, which is supporting that. If you think about the kind of the longer-term trajectory of NIM and that upward bias toward it, as I noted earlier, fixed asset repricing, we continue to benefit from. We're seeing something between 8 and 9 basis points of year-over-year improvement in NIM this year from fixed asset repricing. That should continue on with additional benefits into '26, additional benefits into '27. And then just the general steepening of the yield curve certainly is helpful for us as well.

Got it. We just skipped to the fourth ARS question. And after a little bit, you can put up the answer. I guess shifting gears -- maybe not shifting, let's stay here. We talked about loan growth. We talked about deposit growth, we talk net interest margin. Obviously, bringing that all together, we get to net interest income. Maybe just help us kind of frame it. I did some quick math, but I'd love to get yours, just how do you see NII shaping up in the second half of the year? And just maybe elaborate a bit. I don't know if the Fed goes 25 basis points next week. Someone said to me 50. Just how the rate environment influences that.

Yes. Well, so we do expect to see some sequential growth in NII dollars into the third quarter, and we should see further growth into the fourth. And as we go into next year, expecting to see a very solid continued revenue growth profile from net interest income as we go into 2026. So feel quite good about how that is shaping up. We've positioned the balance sheet to be effectively asset neutral right now. And that was very intentional in order to maintain the stability in the face of what is clearly an uncertain environment. If we start to see some Fed rate reductions, we think we're very well placed to be able to capture that in terms of additional lower deposit costs even as we continue to power deposit growth from here.

So I guess on the earnings call in July, you mentioned flat NII in Q3, and now we're saying up NII in Q3, up again in Q4. I think at one point, you're talking up 8% to 9% for the year. You kind of keep on raising that.

Again, we'll reset guidance more formally when we come to our earnings call in October. But my expectation is we'll be at the high end of that range, if not above that range as we relook.

And then fee income. Obviously, it's been a big focus of Huntington for the last several years. Just maybe how you think about fee income growth from here? I'd love you to touch on payments, wealth management, capital markets have certainly you put a lot of investments there.

Jason, I can start. There's 3 areas -- 3 primary areas that we've been focused: wealth, capital markets and payments. You mentioned the 3. Obviously, there's bringing those capabilities to our existing installed customer base, deepening those relationships with wealth capabilities, cap markets capabilities and payments capabilities has been and is proving to be a really great opportunity for us. There are businesses specifically that we've been investing intentionally in. So a disproportionate amount of that investment that Zach described, we've been pulling out of our operating expenses go to those 3 businesses. And as a result of that, we're seeing very strong growth in each of the 3. I'll highlight specifically our wealth business. That's a business that's doubled over the last 5 years. We announced at Investor Day, we would intend to double it again over the next 5 years. We have the number of advisory customers actually growing double digits. We're seeing AUM grow double digits, and we would see that continuing. So we're very bullish about the opportunity in those 3 and other areas of fee revenue, and we'll continue to disproportionately invest there.

Maybe I would just double-click into that. So for the third quarter, seeing fee revenues, essentially spot on our initial guidance in the quarter, around $550 million on a core basis. And as Brant noted, the real power drivers of that are our payments, wealth management and capital markets. Those businesses collectively in the second quarter grew 11% year-over-year in terms of revenue growth. That's about the profile that we're expecting from them over the next several years.

So fees up 4% to 6% for the year. Still feel good about that?

We feel good about that.

Maybe to touch on credit quality for a second. You talked about it earlier, but just as you look out, any particular areas of concern that you an eye on that consumer data has maybe been a little bit soft. There's this tariff impact starting to hurt or affect the commercial side. So maybe kind of talk to what you're seeing, hearing from your customers?

We still see credit quality as being quite strong. The consumer still is -- our consumer is still quite strong. We're seeing utilization rates that are still low. A number of our consumer-focused businesses like our auto finance business have had very strong summer months. We also see payments data that would say that our payments activity through debit has slowed slightly, but is still looking very good. We've been very focused on continuing to enhance our risk and underwriting in our small business area because that's an area that was impacted by rising rates, but we've seen that continue to stabilize, and I think we'll potentially see some improvement there. But overall, we feel very good about where we are from a credit quality perspective. And we obviously manage that quite tightly and have been for a number of years.

Got it. And maybe capital. Just, I guess, how do we think about trajectory of capital ratios maybe going forward? You talked about loan growth, talked about organic expansion. And just Huntington has not bought back stock in quite a while, just how do you think about potential share repurchase in the future?

Yes. Great question. I'll take that one. From a capital perspective, as we've noted on a number of prior occasions, we are primarily managing toward the adjusted CET1 ratio, inclusive of AOCI. And we have a target operating range for that metric of between 9% and 10%. As of last quarter, we were right at 9%, and that's been growing steadily over the last 2 years. And so our expectation is we'll continue to see that metric rise, and we will drive that up into the middle of that operating range. And what we're obviously very fortunate is we've got a top-tier return on capital, which is allowing us to power the -- and fund the high-return loan growth that we're seeing come through and that we're continue to project out for quite a long time to come here, while also driving capital ratios higher and supporting a terrific dividend. The expectation that we have is once we get through the Veritex acquisition, the opportunity to get back to more programmatic share repurchases will be there. But fundamentally, the model is working very well from our perspective. If you take us to back management and the Board is a top 10 shareholder of the company. And so our interests are very much aligned and we really like the way the value creation model is setting up. We're seeing high single-digit to low double-digit sustainable growth in tangible book value per share. As we noted at our Investor Day, we expect to see that level of growth in TBV per share through the end of the decade, last quarter was 16% year-over-year growth in tangible book value per share. So very strong fundamental growth and then coupling that with a top-tier and growing return, we think, is a really winning model for shareholder returns.

So early 2026 would maybe be a good guess?

I think what we said is when we get through the Veritex acquisition, there could be some modest share repurchases this year, but I think more programmatic and normal amount as we go into next year.

Makes sense. Makes sense. I guess on Veritex, I think when it was announced, a lot of people understood the strategic rationale of it. Although with any deal, there's obviously integration risk and other risks. But the financial impact seemed, I guess, very little, at least on the surface. Yes, as you spent a bit more time going through it and just kind of any updated thoughts in terms of accretion, dilution, expense-save opportunities, revenue synergies and just maybe update us a few more months in.

Well, I think 2 months in, we're even more encouraged about the strategic opportunity that Veritex offers. We believed in due diligence that Veritex team had very good customers. And as we've dug in, that's been obviously confirmed, and we feel great about our opportunity to expand the relationships of their existing relationships. We also feel great about the people because ultimately, at the end of the day, local colleagues with local relationships, we've been able to work through the org structure and approach with all of the folks and feel great about where that has landed. And so that would be the second large component. And then lastly, in working through this, we have very good line of sight into the cost savings that we had projected as a part of the transaction. So 2 months in, we're feeling very good about where we are.

Any questions from the audience? Two in the front row. Can you just shout it out, I'll repeat it.

[indiscernible]

Yes. We like the fact that we had a founder who's been in the market in Texas for 40 years. We like the fact that we had bankers that were very experienced and tenured and many of them had operated under a large bank credit organization, and so had a good understanding of what would be required of us. We actually like where their retail locations are even though the organization has not been retail focused. Veritex also brings a substantial amount of brand opportunity to us. Their locations are well placed. Their signage is well placed. It really creates an opportunity for us to expand the awareness of the Huntington brand in the market. All of those things were quite attractive. And then in the due diligence, we had the opportunity to take a look at the customer base and the sponsors and would it be folks that would fit into our -- customers that would fit into our credit appetite, and we were very encouraged by that. So all of those things, frankly, made it quite attractive. They also have a lot of density in Dallas. Dallas now becomes a top 5 city for Huntington. It makes Texas a top 3 state. And so having an opportunity like that, that has density in a very, very important strategic market made it quite attractive to us.

I would just tag on to that, and just such not only clear line of sight to the expense synergies, but also very well-defined revenue synergy opportunities. And if you go back to the presentation, one of the things we tried to do in this morning's materials was to show just how well now 3 years on, we continue to power revenue synergies from the TCF acquisition, the same confidence we've got now here. If you think about rolling out our whole consumer franchise into those branch locations that Brant just mentioned, the ability to bring our value-added fee services and really penetrate treasury management, capital markets, wealth into their really high-quality commercial customer base. And then just the added heft and weight that we'll have in the market, we believe will produce a meaningful lift in our own larger corporate commercial lending and deposit gathering activity. So I think it's really -- it's a home run for us. And as Brant said, we think the springboard that will drive for long-term revenue growth in one of the most attractive states in the country is certainly going to be pretty exciting.

I'll add one more point. Another component of it that was encouraging to us is the operating model that you've heard me describe that operating model really makes the integration of Veritex very, very much possible. And it also is what creates the opportunity in the springboard for the future. Being able to take that customer base and those individuals and integrate them into a locally empowered model, but then also bring the expertise of the national specialties to their customer base, we viewed as a really great opportunity.

[indiscernible] back in the market for another acquisition relatively quickly.

Our focus has and will be our top priority to be organic growth. Obviously, these types of events are episodic. It's a high hurdle for us from a financial, strategic and cultural component. But our focus is really on organic.

On that note, please join me in thanking Zach and Brant for their time today.