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Super-regional Huntington Bank holds $210 billion in assets under management and has been the nation’s largest SBA lender for seven consecutive years. It’s coming off a strong quarter that saw its net interest income (NII) rise 11% year over year, and in its most recent earnings call, it raised its full-year guidance for NII to 5%–7% growth over 2024.
We spoke with Huntington’s CFO, Zachary Wasserman, to hear what its consumer and business clients are saying about the economy, and to learn what factors drove the bank’s success in an unusually volatile quarter.
“Cautious optimism” among business owners: Huntington’s business-owner clients aren’t overly concerned about the prospect of a recession yet, Wasserman told CFO Brew.
“What we’re hearing is cautious optimism that the environment will sort of resolve here,” he said. He’s “still seeing a growth orientation” among this group of clients, which he describes as “battle-tested enterprises.”
“They’ve gone through Covid, they’ve gone through inflation, they’ve gone through the interest rate rises, and I think they know how to manage their business” in the face of challenges like tariffs, he said.
Some of Huntington’s clients are Tier 1 suppliers to automakers, which have made plans to weather the storm.
“They’ve got a lot of inventory, and they’re preparing contingency plans for how they’ll deal with different potential cost structures from tariffs,” Wasserman told us. “Again, we’re not Pollyanna here. There are real risks, but there’s also a path through this.”
Wasserman is seeing some indicators of the impact of tariffs. He’s seen companies that deal in small durable goods, such as home and garden equipment and snowmobiles, delay orders for winter items “given the uncertainty around costs,” he said.
He’s also observed some hesitancy around dealmaking. Huntington’s M&A group “did see somewhat lower deal-making in the first quarter, and the first part of Q2 is likewise a little slow,” he said. Clients are pushing the timing of deals out until they can better “understand the implications of the environment, but there’s a pretty strong expectation that ultimately deals will get done.”
Consumer behavior has yet to shift: Though surveys have shown a sharp dip in consumer sentiment, Wasserman says he hasn’t seen it affect behavior yet, at least where banking is concerned.
“Forward estimates for loans have actually grown 5% thus far in the last two weeks,” he said. “Debit card spending is very normal and on trend, deposit activity iss on trend.” He noted that Huntington “accelerated growth of new customer acquisition in the first quarter, in all our major business [areas].” Wasserman’s observations are in line with what other big banks are seeing: Consumers aren’t slowing down their spending just yet. (Some of that may be because they’re hurrying to make purchases before the impact of the tariffs hits.)
A careful approach to risk has paid off: Huntington’s cautious approach to risk, Wasserman said, has helped it to thrive in volatile times. The bank pursues a philosophy of operating with a “moderate-to-low-risk appetite” across four “pillars: capital, liquidity, credit, and operational,” he said. “We’re always really focused on protecting capital.”
That approach, Wasserman said, allowed Huntington to accelerate lending in 2023, a time when many other banks tightened their purse strings, and to expand into new markets and verticals.
“We want to be strong in every part of the economic cycle,” he said. “We know it’s at this point in the economic cycle when you can potentially win a lot of market share if you’re prepared to grow and others are not.”