Analyst at Fidelity, and I'm here with Huntington Banker, oh sorry, Bancshares, a $25 billion market cap bank based in Ohio with over 1,000 branches now. So you've got a pretty big distribution. Zach Wasserman, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, will be here today. He's going to do a short presentation for us, and then we'll go into Q&A. Zach has been at Huntington since November of 2019. Prior to that, he was at Visa. You were, I think, the Chief Financial Officer of the Americas at Visa. And before that, you spent many years at American Express.
That's correct.
So, very much welcome to BAAB.
Thank you.
We appreciate you coming to Boston and look forward to hearing more about Huntington.
Thanks, Ruth. Good afternoon, everybody. Great to be with you. So thank you for joining us here for the presentation, and thanks BAAB, for hosting us. Today, I'd like to start by welcoming not only everyone in the room, but everyone listening online. Very much appreciate your interest in Huntington. Before we get started, please review slide 2, which applies to the forward-looking statements we'll be making today. Moving to slide 3, there are five key messages I would like to leave you with. First, we are delivering accelerated organic growth. Robust loan production has driven peer-leading loan growth, which was 6.3% annualized in the third quarter. We have also sustained deposit growth, with average balances having increased by 5.6% year over year. Second, we are executing our down beta action plans and dynamically managing through the interest rate environment.
Third, we are driving fee revenues higher with strategies centered on payments, wealth management, and capital markets. Fourth, we're maintaining our strong credit performance. Net charge-offs for the third quarter continue to be in the top quartile versus peers, and our allowance for credit losses is in the top tier. Finally, the net result of these actions we expect to result in expanded profitability into the fourth quarter and next year. This outlook includes record net interest income dollars for the full year of 2025. Turning to slide 4, our strategies are working well and delivering strong returns on the investments we've made across the franchise. In the third quarter, our annualized end-of-period loan growth rate of 6.3% ranked at the top of our peer group.
These results were supported by both core businesses as well as new initiatives we've added to increase contributions to loan growth over the course of the year. Entering the fourth quarter, we expect these new initiatives to continue to deliver increasing contributions to our net loan growth. Since the beginning of 2023, our cumulative loan growth has outperformed peers by over 7%. Deposit growth also continues to track to levels near the top of the peer group, as we have grown deposit balances by $8 billion, or 5.6% from a year ago. Relative to peers, our deposit growth rate is 6% above the peer median. Turning to slide 5, as we discussed three weeks ago at earnings, we continue to drive net interest income on a dollar basis higher over time.
In the near term, we see net interest income decreasing modestly in the fourth quarter before stabilizing and growing over the course of the first half of 2025. We expect the growth trajectory of net interest income to accelerate in the second half of 2025, driven by our sustained loan growth and a stable to rising net interest margin. This should result in an attractive Q4 level of growth year over year and also result in record net interest income for the full year of 2025. As I mentioned, we are actively executing down beta action plans across the bank, and as a result, September cost of deposits declined by seven basis points from August. As we ended October, total cost of deposits further declined by 11 basis points. This reflects the management discipline and the agility of our teams to manage through this dynamic interest rate environment.
As we follow market expectations for some further level of rate reductions from the Fed into year-end, we're very well positioned to quickly react and adjust our plans to reflect the operating environment and manage net interest margin. Turning to slide 6, we are continuing to systematically adjust balance sheet positioning for the most likely rate environment. Over time, we have added downside rate protection hedges, and in this quarter, we modestly added to that position, adding $2.5 billion of forward-starting three- to four-year hedges. The chart on the top of page 6 represents the current schedule for effective hedges and reflects the increasing level of active hedges coming on throughout 2025. This hedging program supports our outlook for reduced asset sensitivity over the next several quarters. In addition to the hedges, we are adding modest duration to the securities portfolio, specifically in the Treasuries asset class.
The combination of down beta actions, securities duration, and balance sheet hedging strategies collectively represent the expected over 50% reduction in asset sensitivity by the end of this quarter compared to the Q2 level and further reductions in the first half of 2025. Turning to slide 7, growing value-added fee revenues is a core focus, and we have numerous strategies in place to drive this growth across payments, wealth management, and capital markets. As I mentioned at earnings, total adjusted fee revenues grew 12% year over year in Q3, with the percentage of total revenues up strongly from 25% a year ago to 28% this year, driven by strong performance in these strategic fee areas of focus. Within payments and cash management, commercial payments, including treasury management, are growing at 8% year over year.
An important catalyst to continued robust treasury management revenue growth is our actions to bring in-house our merchant acquiring platform, which, as we shared previously, is expected to add approximately $25 million of annual fee revenues next year. This equates to just over one percentage point of total fee revenue base today. Wealth management continues to perform exceptionally well, with assets under management increasing by 22% year over year and advisory household growth of 7% year over year. We were pleased to see capital markets grow sequentially in the third quarter, with revenues increasing 50% year over year. With robust pipelines in advisory and accelerated commercial loan production that I described earlier, we expect capital markets revenues to again grow sequentially into the fourth quarter. Briefly turning to slide 8, credit continues to perform exceptionally well.
Net charge-offs have been relatively stable over the past four quarters, with our performance tracking to top quartile performance compared to peers. Our allowance for credit losses is also top tier compared to peers. On slide 9, I would like to recap our operating approach. We are leveraging our position of strength to drive the organic growth I mentioned earlier. Our investments in new geographies and commercial verticals are yielding results even above our initial business case. We are actively implementing our down beta action plans and managing through the dynamic interest rate environment. We're on track to reduce our level of asset sensitivity and maintain net interest margin in a tight corridor. Fee revenues remain a critical priority for us, and our three key areas of payments, wealth management, and capital markets continue to perform very well.
On the expense front, we're continuing to rigorously manage expenses, taking action to drive cost savings into the organization and allocating those savings to self-fund revenue-producing investments. We're maintaining our discipline focus on credit through the cycle, aligned with our aggregate moderate to low-risk appetite. With those opening remarks, let me turn it over to Ruth to open the Q&A session.
Great. Well, thank you, Zach.
You're welcome.
Okay, so lots of great stuff there that we can talk about. Maybe we'll start with loan growth. So you really have been a standout versus peers, delivering a very strong loan growth. Kind of what's your confidence in sustaining that? And I mean, how have you really been able to drive this new loan growth?
Yeah, we're really pleased with how the business is operating right now. The execution is exceptionally strong, and the outlook for loan growth in the fourth quarter, you may remember at our earnings call three weeks ago, I guided that we'd see somewhere between 4% and 5% year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter. I now think we're tracking to the high end of that growth range, to be clear. Very strong performance, quite a bit of momentum coming into the fourth quarter. And the sources of the growth are really very much what I illustrated on the slide earlier in the prepared remarks. We're seeing our existing core businesses perform quite well. Our regional banking division, which is really servicing a small business up to the lower end of middle market that is delivered regionally, seeing very strong performance, almost record production every month this year, very strong.
Distribution finance, this is the small ticket durable goods business that we're providing floor plan financing for. That business has doubled since we bought it from TCF in 2021. We're seeing continued strong growth there, continued solid growth in auto. And then the new initiatives continue to ramp, and I think you saw that on that slide. Every quarter ramping up in terms of loan volume, and I expect another step up in solid loan volumes in Q4. So executing well across the board, Q4 looks pretty good.
All right, sounds good. You also talked about kind of the deposit repricing and the down beta strategy. So what are some of those actions that you're implementing? What are some specifics around that?
Yeah, so it's been a series of actions, most notably earlier this year, beginning to shift the mix from time-based deposit production to money market deposit production, which is clearly quicker to react to lower rate environment. We've also significantly shortened the duration of new time deposits. This time last year, the typical duration was something like 11 months. I'm sorry. Now it's more like five months. So significantly reducing the duration there. We've lowered go-to-market pricing considerably and also reduced back book pricing on existing money market accounts. And so that trajectory of down deposit costs, which we saw 11 basis points just this past month, is somewhat better than our original expectations for the down beta performance. Taking a step back, one of the things we've been very intentional about this year was elevating deposit growth.
We actually beat our initial plan, growing deposit near or actually above 4%, which was at or above the high end of the full year deposit growth forecast. What that's allowed us to do is to bring down the loan-to-deposit ratio from 84%- 80% in the last year. That's exactly what you'd want to do at this point in the cycle to be able to really drive with forceful action the down beta action plan and have already stockpiled those deposits to fund our accelerating loan growth. So it's all shaping up pretty well. I do think the near-term trends we've seen and the somewhat higher belly of the curve over the last month has been incrementally positive for the net interest income outlook in the fourth quarter and going into next year.
So you talked about the additional hedging that you've done to kind of protect that downside rate. So will you continue to do more of this? I mean, it sounds like a lot of the asset sensitivity has come out with the hedges.
Yeah, it's a terrific question. And on this topic, we try to take a very disciplined and systematic approach to attempting to color the range of the most likely outcome in rates, the most likely distribution of probabilities, and really gradually shift the exposure of the company to be as optimal as we possibly can. If you zoom back, you will know that we significantly increased asset sensitivity before the rate cycle began, I think in a very intentional way that served us very well to protect capital, drive benefits out of the rate cycle. Now we have begun to do the opposite and shift that exposure back toward more neutrality. I think we've got it about right. With that being said, it's a discussion that we look at no less frequently than weekly. And so we'll be dynamic.
Clearly, the environment continues to evolve here in terms of the outlook, and we'll see that dynamic in executing it. With that being said, I think we've got it about right for now, and we'll continue to monitor very closely.
Okay, so all of this growth and actions that you're doing to manage the down beta, you also kind of in the third quarter talked about the net interest income dollars being down. So what's driving that?
Sure. The guidance that we've given on the Q3 earnings call in October is we would see a couple basis points, maybe three or four basis points lower NIM, and even though loans continue to grow, which they are, seeing nice acceleration, that would likely drive a little bit lower dollars of spread revenue into the fourth quarter. As I just mentioned a minute ago, I am seeing somewhat better outlook into the fourth quarter now. I think it's probably more likely to be right around neutral, maybe just a slightly lower. I think what the driver of that is a little bit better NIM from the actions I just mentioned and what I just described a second ago. I think what you're seeing effectively is the early stages of the down beta playbook, which typically start a little slower and accelerate over time.
And so that's why there's somewhat more pressure in the first quarter here, first full quarter of the down rate trajectory. With that being said, it looks more neutral than our outlook even just a few weeks ago, given some of the actions and the successes we've had thus far in the quarter.
Okay, great. So you have quite a bit of fixed rate loans on the balance sheet. Can you talk about the potential to benefit from fixed rate repricing into 2025 and what that looks like?
Approximately 50% of our loan book is fixed, and much of that is in relatively shorter duration products. What we're seeing is roll-off yields being considerably lower than new production yields. This time last year, we were seeing something like a 300 basis point delta in roll-off versus new production yields. Of course, as you go through time, that begins to constrain. Right now, we're running at around 170 basis points of difference between roll-off yield and new production yield. So it's still a very significant benefit. We've discussed this at length in some of our other meetings this year, but we expect about 12 basis points in this year, in 2024, of fixed asset repricing benefit in the total NIM. We are seeing that fairly radically across the quarters of this year.
Next year looks to be something like seven basis points, maybe even a little more than that, based on what we've seen in terms of the longer end rates sort of staying a bit higher. That dynamic is a really nice tailwind. It is accumulating and continuing to drive benefits. It's one of the major factors that allow us to rise that interest margin as we go throughout the course of 2025.
Okay, great. So there's a lot of great momentum going on at the bank, and part of that is definitely on the fee side. You talked about it in your prepared remarks a little bit, but payments is definitely an area that is showing nice growth. And you also, I think, are kind of transitioning into having your own merchant acquiring. So can you talk about that and why are you doing what made you decide to want to do merchant acquiring and what's the outlook for payments?
Yeah. The value-added fee businesses generally, we see as so critical because, A, they deliver capital-light revenues. They're additive to return on capital, very recurring revenue businesses, but they're also strategically critical, just deepening relationship with customers, sort of wrapping more services around our customers and cementing the primary bank relationship status. So they're both strategically and financially critical. And a key one is payments. And if you think about the major growth driver for Huntington and payments, it's really commercial-related payment activities, most notably treasury management, where we are providing core payment services to our commercial operating accounts and really executing very well. The sales channels are working very effectively. We've seen high single digits to low double digit revenue growth there all year long. And my expectation for the long-term planning horizon is to likewise see high single digit to low double digit revenue growth there.
Merchant acquiring is just a really important kind of leg of the stool in terms of product capabilities within the TM space. It's a core product for receivables for our customers. We can embed it very closely into checking account value props. And I think just as I noted in my prepared remarks, expecting to roughly double those revenues into 2025 and continue a nice rapid growth. We just launched the business internally. We just launched it after bringing it in-house in October. And already we've seen sales pipelines double the growth rate that they were before. And the kind of early stages look pretty encouraging of how that's going to go.
Okay. Capital markets, maybe we'll hit that one next. Again, you've had really good growth there. How should we think about that for longer-term expectations of how that should evolve?
Every one of these businesses, payments, capital markets, and wealth, I expect to grow high single digit to low double digit over a long-term planning horizon. So we're really pretty bullish about all of them. The capital markets business for us is about one-third advisory and two-thirds commercial banking-related capital market services like debt syndication, interest rate hedging that goes along with debt production, things of that nature. On the commercial banking-related revenues, as we have accelerated commercial banking loan production, we're seeing that flow through now into the capital markets-related revenues as well. And so we've seen nice sustained sequential growth throughout this year. I expect to see another quarter of sequential growth into the fourth quarter, and that should continue on with strength into 2025. M&A advisory, not surprisingly, this has been industry-wide, has been a little bit more up and down throughout the course of this year.
Q4 last year, very strong. Q1 weak. Q2 very strong. Q3 was a little soft. Q4 looks very good, and I think what we're seeing generally is kind of the gradually resolving uncertainties in the world vis-à-vis the interest rate environment, the economic environment, the political environment are just allowing a more catalyzed and smooth flowing of M&A activity, and as has been widely reported, 2025 looks pretty robust for M&A across all industries, and so feeling pretty bullish about where that will go. I do expect another quarter of sequential growth of capital markets into Q4 and expecting very solid growth as we go into 2025.
Have you been doing a lot of hiring in this area?
Capital markets is not an area we've made significant new investments in. We've made significant investments over time in this business, but probably primarily our new investment around the value-added fee businesses is going into payments and wealth management. With that being said, capital markets, we've got a terrific platform. And so it's really about linking those product capabilities with the activities that are going on in the commercial banking and then M&A advisory space, but looks pretty solid as we get into Q4 and 2025.
All right. And then the wealth management business, I mean, I guess there's synergies from the overall bank. Do you feel like is that part of the capturing more of those synergies and being able to do more with customers?
Wealth is one of those businesses that's just such a natural flow-through of the trust that our customers have with us. We have sort of typically number one or very top rankings for customer trust. And in addition to that, we've got very strong capabilities to provide planning-oriented long-term asset management services. And that's really the strategy is leverage the trust and the depth of relationship we have with our customers and introduce them to these quite strong product capabilities, actually. And it's really working. I think the sales channels now are beginning to really knit well together. As I noted before, we've been seeing high single digit to low double digit growth in households and near record, if not record production, virtually every month this year in terms of net asset flows. And so it's working.
I think there's a long road of additional customer penetration to come from here. Again, I'm expecting double digit revenue growth pretty sustainably from this business.
Is that hiring more advisors, more wealth managers?
That's part of it, Ruth. For sure, that's part of it. But our platform is pretty scalable. So it's even more about raising brand awareness, raising customer awareness of this product, and then knitting the digital and human channels together to kind of more effectively sell it, which we are doing and is working pretty well. Assets under management up 22% year on year in the third quarter as an indication of how well that's going.
Okay, great. So the theme of our conference is the need for scale, fact or fiction. And so I'm curious from your perspective, what are your views on the importance of scale and how should we think about where Huntington has scale and how should we measure that scale?
Scale is certainly important, and I would tell you we've got plenty of scale to be successful. The way we think about it is we have a series of national businesses, many of which are leading in their product category and have plenty of scale and efficiency to compete, and then we've got in our locally based businesses, the consumer, the small business, the smaller end of middle market that we really service locally. We've got now 14 states that we're operating in that represent some very attractive geographies to grow those businesses, so the scale that we have offers plenty of growth opportunities for us, and hence the focus on organic growth. Let's go capture those opportunities.
Let's systematically execute the loan growth, the deposit growth, the fee business, continually re-engineer our baseline operating expenses to be able to funnel an outsized share of expense growth into the investment categories, and it's really working. I think the proof and the results that we've been delivering this year is good manifest evidence of that.
Okay, great. Expenses, maybe we'll move there. Yeah, I think you're talking about 4.5% expense growth for this year, core expense growth for this year. I guess how should we think about that? Is that a normalized year? Is that maybe just a little bit of how you manage expenses?
The way we think about expenses overall, and we've discussed this before, so that this is the same kind of message that I've shared before, is we are goaling ourselves to drive positive operating leverage, to calibrate the level of expense growth relative to revenue growth. Secondly, to systematically re-engineer baseline operating expenses. We have taken hundreds of millions of dollars out of the baseline operating expenses over the last couple of years, and that allows us to then funnel an outsized amount of the investment growth into key offensive categories like technology development, like marketing for new customer acquisition, and the select addition of new personnel to build capabilities. To give you a sense, in the last couple of years, we've grown overall expenses at around 4%-5%, but investments within that number have been 25% growth.
That's one of the reasons why you're seeing the kind of outsized level of success of the company. And so that model is working very well. It's very disciplined and consistent over time and really enables us to execute those investments in a way that's effective and really driving that growth. And so that's our plan to continue that into 2025, for sure. I do think the approach we've set up for this year is setting up quite well and very much in alignment with what we've said. Overall, 4.5% for the full year, but decelerating throughout the course of the year. Q4 expense growth should be about 3% year on year.
I'm not going to give guidance yet on 2025, but I think that's a nice run rate for us to continue to kind of drive solid positive operating leverage as we exit this year and continue to drive positive operating leverage out into 2025.
What was investment spend this year? How if we think about that?
It's similar to the levels I just mentioned. It's very, very robust. I mean, just since I've joined the company five years ago, we've quadrupled technology development, to give you a sense, so very, very robust. I believe we're punching above our weight within our regional bank peer set in terms of the percent of expenses that are really investment related, and that's why we're driving this outsized fee growth, outsized loan and deposit growth.
That's great. I'm going to pause and see if there's any questions from the audience and then get back. Okay. Right here.
Hi, Zach. Manan Gosalia, Morgan Stanley. You noted the higher belly of the curve is incrementally positive for NII, but at the same time, we've had a couple of rate cuts maybe come out of the forward curve. Has that impacted your ability to negotiate those deposit costs down at all? Are you seeing any early signs of pushback from clients?
Yeah. Terrific question, Manan. And the short answer is no. We're not seeing any early signs of significant changes. If anything, we're leaning incrementally more into down beta actions right now. I would tell you the 11 basis points we saw coming down between September and October was better than our initial plan for the quarter and just an indication that the plan is really working very well. I think a higher rate environment where the short end stays a bit higher than it was previously forecasted, let's say a month ago, but the belly in the longer end is also higher is incrementally accretive to us for NIM overall. The beta percentage will likely be about the same. Obviously, the actual level of funding costs will be slightly higher, but you'll have much higher asset yields as a result also.
And the net of that is a positive net outcome for us. So look, our view is we manage this very dynamically month by month by month, watching it and really optimizing along the way. But I do think the way the world has evolved here in outlook at least is incrementally positive to us.
Peter Winter from D.A. Davidson. So, Zach, if I look at the efficiency ratio, you had usually run below peers, peer leading. This year it's closer to 60%. You've made those investments that you accelerated. The medium-term efficiency ratio is mid-50s. Are you still comfortable with that? When do you think you could hit it? And then as you grow this fee income businesses, does that hurt maybe the efficiency ratio a little bit in terms of that medium-term outlook?
Thank you for your question. It's a really good one. The outcome of our focus on positive operating leverage should be improving efficiency ratios year by year. And that is my forecast. As we run long range forecasts and both short and long range forecasts, we're looking for positive operating leverage and improvements in the fee and the efficiency ratio. I will tell you kind of philosophically, I don't think there's a level that is the sacrosanct level for efficiency ratio. What you really want is the vector and the trajectory of that to be positive. And to some degree, the efficiency ratio of various banks is very much a function of the mix of their business between fee revenues, spread revenues, and the kind of the nature of the fee revenues, as you noted in your question. So that's our view of it.
We want to drive improvements in efficiency ratio over time. And I do think that based on everything I'm seeing in our long range planning, continuing to drive south within the 50s is the expectation I've got as well.
Zach, on the kind of mix of growing wealth or payments or capital markets, does that structurally change the efficiency ratio?
I mean, to some degree, yes. Each of those businesses has their own efficiency ratio, and that's what I said. I think, look, the goal here is to drive profit, not to manage these individual geography metrics. With that being said, our plan is absolutely centered on improvements over time and the efficiency ratio. That's the outcome of positive operating leverage. I do think it's A, it's a good discipline to have, and B, it's absolutely sustainable to do it, and so that's a nice elevation of profit growth over and above the growth rate of revenue that we can drive.
Got it. Okay. Anything else? Anyone else?
Jon Arfstrom, RBC. What's different about the loan growth environment, Zach, to talk about going to the higher end of the range three weeks after earnings? And is anything seasonal or is this sustainable?
It's a terrific question, Jon. Look, I think frankly what we're seeing is just incrementally that much more success in the execution of the businesses and as well pretty broad economic strength sort of underlying that. I did quite a bit of banker reach outs and due diligence in the early summer to kind of August timeframe, getting ready for conferences and earnings in October. And interestingly, what I was expecting to see, Jon, as I did that, I talked to the regional folks and the kind of nationally oriented folks was, what are we seeing on the ground right now? And my expectation was sort of gradually moderating economic growth, which is I think what kind of the economic forecast would have indicated.
What I actually heard was the opposite, was actually we're seeing a kind of an upswing in economic growth and sort of somewhat tighter labor markets and incrementally more bullishness on the part of our customer base, and we're somewhat more oriented to the Midwest, which is doing very well economically, and we're focused on a number of corporate verticals, which are doing pretty well, but I was actually heartened to hear about that, and I think so that's part of it, and part of it is just really strong execution in the various areas that we're seeing that we detailed out in the prepared remarks, the core business really firing. We talked in Q3 that loan pipeline, late stage commercial loan pipelines, these are deep into the sales process. We're up high teens percentage points from the prior quarter.
And the new areas of focus, the Carolinas, Texas, they are really performing very strongly. And then the new commercial verticals also really doing well. So we're seeing nice, somewhat incrementally positive trajectories in both of those areas.
So, Zach, I'm going to switch topics a little bit and go to credit. I think we've seen pretty stable net charge-offs. So what do you, I guess, how do you think about credit risk in some of the newer lending areas? And is there anything that we should think about as far as different risk profiles or different kind of seasoning of these portfolios?
Yeah. Nothing has changed in our credit posture, just to be clear. And we have every confidence we're going to continue to see a very strong level of credit performance from Huntington overall. When we enter into new areas or new territories and new business lines, we keep a very tight focus on the credit, particularly initially as we're beginning to learn and roll out. And so the goal that we have as an enterprise is to be industry leading in terms of low credit losses to really live by that aggregate moderate to low risk appetite, even as we also keep one of the strongest credit reserves in the peer group. And so nothing about that general approach is any different as we enter these new businesses.
Okay. Maybe if I could go to auto for a minute because you mentioned that as seeing some nice acceleration that has picked up. I guess what do you think, is that an area where you want to continue to add more capital? There's been a lot of volatility in the auto space. So curious what your kind of near to medium term outlook is for auto.
For us, our auto business is one of the most attractive businesses we've got. And it's exactly the business you'd want to incrementally lean into production now. It's a fixed rate, short-duration asset. It's roughly two years, just under two years duration on average. It is a major driver of that fixed asset repricing that we were discussing earlier where you're seeing roll-off yields be a lot lower than new production yields. It's also, I would tell you, one of the most efficient and optimizable businesses that we've got. Think 90% of decisions in a three-second or less timeframe, 10% efficiency ratio, extraordinarily precise in terms of the ability to operate that business. We can dial in pricing on a Thursday, observe the outcomes from a marginal revenue and demand perspective over the weekend, and then optimize it again on Tuesday for the coming week.
So it's an incredibly optimizable business, which is driving at this point phenomenal returns, all in the prime and super prime credit quality where we've seen delinquencies and charge-offs be rock stable and solid. And we've been in this business for 85 years. We've got a lot of deep relationships. I would tell you as well, it's often a business where we have both sides of the relationship. We're commercial banking the dealer, which is very profitable, and then providing indirect financing on the consumer side to support that as well. So I think run rate production was something in the low $1 billion per quarter about a year ago. It's roughly now $2 billion a quarter. And I think probably stay at that level roughly for the near term.
Again, in a presumably declining interest rate environment, it's a great asset to put some somewhat fixed duration onto the sheet.
Okay. All right. That's great. Just on capital, you're currently like 8.9% CET1. I think your target is 9%-10%. So basically almost there. I guess can you talk about the capital priorities once you kind of get to that 9%?
Sure. And we've been very consistent in this approach, which is we want to do two things at this point over the last year, drive capital higher, but also put the primary focus for internal capital generation toward our top priority, which is funding high return loan growth. We're seeing terrific returns at the margin from the loans that we're growing. And we're seeing that nice acceleration in loan growth that we've been forecasting all year, even as we've also driven capital higher by about a percent, roughly a percent in the last year. As you noted in the question, as of Q3, our adjusted CET1, inclusive of AOCI, the basis on which we manage the regulatory capital was 8.9% as of the third quarter. And our target operating range is 9%-10%. So we're just on the cusp of hitting that range.
And the goal would be to continue to drive up into that range. But once we do get into that range, start to have a more normalized capital distribution posture that would include some degree of share purchases. That's our expectation. Clearly, the pace to some degree is a function of how fast the loans are growing and also to some degree the long-term interest rate environment and therefore the AOCI levels. With that being said, that's our general posture right now and still have a lot of confidence we'll be able to continue to manage that very well.
Okay. That's great. You announced an Investor Day early 2025. So everyone's looking forward to that. Is there any kind of preview you can talk about or kind of?
We're excited about it as well. Mark your calendars, Thursday, February 6th of next year in New York City. For us, it's been about two and a half years since we held our last investor day. We've continued to develop our strategy, implement the execution plans, and we're excited to share more depth about the continued evolution of that strategy and just where we want to take the company over the next several years.
You've done a lot of investing. I mean, there's been a lot. You've been busy.
Yeah, we have. And the business is performing from our perspective very, very well. And so this will be about going from strength to strength and really highlighting what this next phase of growth will look like for Huntington.
All right. Well, that sounds great. We look forward to February to hear more. So thank you very much, Zach.
Thanks, Ruth, for your hosting, and thanks everybody for your interest today.