Hey, good morning, everybody, and welcome to the first presentation of the 2026 UBS Financial Services Conference. I'm Erika Najarian, your large-cap bank analyst, and I'm super excited to have Huntington Bancshares with us coming off of a very successful Investor Day. Joining us on stage in order is President of the Consumer and Regional Bank, Brant Standridge, CFO, Zach Wasserman, and Scott Kleinman, President of the Commercial Bank. Welcome, guys.
Thank you. It's good to be here with you. Yeah, great.
So, like I said, we're just coming off a very well-received Investor Day for the company, where the clear message is that Huntington is positioned to win whatever the environment is. That said, as we start the year, there are definitely cross-currents for both the consumer and commercial client. So maybe, Brant, I'll start with you. Give us a little bit of insight on how you think the Huntington consumer is doing, given the still strong job market but persistent inflation. And then, Scott, if you could follow up, perhaps, on how your commercial clients are doing, given the cross-currents of deregulation but also policy uncertainty, to say the least.
Yeah, yeah, well, great. Thank you, first of all, Erika, for having us today. We really appreciate the opportunity, and thanks for being at our Investor Day Conference. First of all, from a consumer perspective, everything that we see would say that the consumer is still strong. Certainly, in our credit portfolios, we are starting to have been seeing, for some period of time, some normalization. As we went through the pandemic, there was excess liquidity, and that obviously affected credit quality, and we're seeing normalization, but nothing that would be alarming. We see low utilization rates of credits for consumers, which is great. Our auto business continues to do very, very well and would say the consumer is strong. There is a bifurcation in that when you look at those below 50% of median income, they've been dramatically more impacted by inflation.
So the performance numbers between the top 50% and the bottom 50% are different. That's where there is clearly more stress. But overall, the consumer is doing quite well.
And Scott?
It's another day. There's more tariffs today, so we'll see. But what I would say generally is our clients range from optimistic to cautiously optimistic. They're doing well. They're doing well, and you see that in the credit performance of the company. It is a challenging environment in the sense that every week we're zigging and zagging. But the way I would generally characterize it is they believe we're going to have more good regulatory and whatnot than bad, and they carry that through. And we are seeing that in pipelines, and we are seeing that in the conversations they're having. Obviously, it's a difficult environment to handicap because week to week we're getting this. This has been probably the busiest four weeks of a new president we've seen.
So they're optimistic that will settle down, and I do think over time, again, their view is more good than bad, and that will be the way they approach things.
Scott, maybe as a follow-up here, I think investors are talking a lot about very slow January for activity levels, whether it's loan growth or capital markets. We had a very differentiated message at Investor Day on loan growth. If we could perhaps unpack that and maybe update us on what Capstone pipelines are looking like.
So we'll work backwards. Capstone pipelines and backlogs are actually quite good. January is typically a seasonally slow month, so we didn't expect to have tremendous volumes, and we had tremendous pull-through in the end of last year. So we started out with a little bit of lightness, but generally, we're constructive and optimistic on that backlog as it relates to Capstone. On the loan side, again, we had record-funded production in the fourth quarter. We actually gotten off to a reasonably good start. Some of that, Erika, was things we didn't pull across last year. But again, the tone is relatively good. January, again, for us, seasonally slower. So we're not necessarily deviating from what we think is a constructive backdrop on loan growth.
Got it. So Zach, maybe I'll put you in the hot seat. I just want to dive into some of the key messages that you conveyed at Investor Day and then turn back over to Brant and Scott in terms of the top-of-the-house targets or the business targets. So I thought that lock that you provided from 15.8% GAAP ROTCE return on tangible common equity in 2024 to the 16% and 17% for 2027 was very helpful. A large positive driver was that box NIM expansion. And I know you mentioned that you could see the net interest margin or the NIM go above long-term average. I think the 10-year average is 3.18%. Maybe unpack that a little bit and maybe give us a sense. What do you think? Remember, there's been a lot of change, obviously, in the business and the asset mix of Huntington versus that 10-year average.
What does new Huntington's normalized NIM range look like?
Great questions, Erika. It's good to be with you.
Good to be with you.
I would just highlight what you just said in the question as part of the answer as well, which is we do see the NIM rising toward or above those long-term ranges that we illustrated in our Investor Day. The 10-year, as you noted, 10-year average for NIM was 3.18. Expecting this year to be around flat at roughly 3. So you can see that does imply continued growth in NIM over the next several years into 2026 and 2027. If I think about what's driving that, it's three primary factors. The first of them is the most significant, which is the gradual normalization back to a more typical upward-sloping yield curve than what we've seen over the last several years. And that'll really benefit fixed asset repricing. We've already seen very significant benefits from fixed asset repricing over the course of late 2023 and into 2024.
That'll continue into 2025 this year, but also into 2026 and beyond. So that's a very significant, enduring, and sustainable tailwind for some time. The other one is funding cost reduction. We discussed in our January earnings call that we saw very strong down beta performance in the fourth quarter, 24% down beta just in the very first quarter, which beat our expectations. But we're not done. We will expect to see continued deposit pricing lower over the course of the next four to six quarters. And just beyond that, again, the kind of funding cost benefit relative to asset yields that we'll see from an upward-sloping yield curve will continue to be a very positive factor. So those are the biggest two drivers going forward of NIM expansion.
Two other elements that I would highlight, though, and one thing we profiled in Investor Day was this consistent and systematic approach we have toward portfolio optimization. We are consciously driving faster asset growth, more investment in capital allocation toward the business units that offer the highest risk-adjusted returns, and that often also means highest yields. So some of the new initiatives, our regional banking businesses, our consumer finance businesses are all of that nature. And then lastly, as we continue now to drive very strong levels of customer acquisition and deepening, that is playing through into higher growth of non-interest-bearing deposits, which grew into the fourth quarter, and also lower interest-bearing elements. And so just the fundamental nature of the deposit base will throw off NIM benefits over the next several years.
Thank you. And just wanted to ask this follow-up question because this came up in your last meeting. Are you seeing the loan spread compression that some of your regional peers have talked about, given the lack of loan growth for the industry?
The short answer is no, we aren't, and I think we're certainly benefiting from the fact that we are launching into some really great attractive areas like the North Carolina and South Carolina and Texas launches, the new specialty verticals that I'm sure we can address in more detail with Scott's comments later.
The 6%-9% Pre-Provision Net Revenue or PPNR growth that you laid out there, I think it's worth reminding the audience how much of that is revenue growth versus expense optimization.
Sure. Another great question, Erika. Thank you. So in the Investor Day, we laid out a medium-term goal of growing PPNR between 6% and 9% on average over time over the medium term. I also noted when I shared that last Thursday that we would see and would expect to see higher than that in a given year, particularly given the expectation for NIM expansion that we discussed just a minute ago. But on average over time, within that range. Of that 6% to 9% growth, we believe that roughly three-quarters of it, 75%, really is driven by revenues and one quarter from positive operating leverage. In our view, that's a very sustainable and durable earnings model where it's really powered by the top line and benefited as well by margin expansion.
That's all with continuing to drive very strong investment back into the franchise that continues to make us sustainably competitive and very much positioned not only to be successful in the short term, but in the long term as well.
A higher market multiple.
We like the higher market multiple as well, Erika. Yes, thank you for noting that.
So underneath the surface, I think you mentioned that underpinning that is mid-single-digit or high mid-single-digit balance sheet growth. I think everybody's now accepted that Huntington has been a great loan growth story. But actually, your deposit story is even better. I mean, how you've grown your deposits when rates went from 0%-5%, then we had a regional banking crisis, has been quite remarkable. So maybe tell us a little bit more about what your expectations are for deposit growth as we march towards 2027.
Yeah. I think broadly speaking, we're expecting to see deposits grow at a fairly similar range to loans. The objective we have is to generally core fund our loan growth with incremental deposit growth. And so I'd expect to see similar levels of deposit growth to the loan growth. In the near term, in 2025, the guidance we've given is to see loan growth in the 5%-7% range and deposit growth in the 3%-5% range, so somewhat below the growth rate of loans. And that's really mainly a function of really rigorously optimizing and driving down deposit costs and really managing funding as best as we can this year. We benefit at this moment from that very strong outperformance on deposit growth over the last two years.
It has enabled us to drive deposit-to-loan ratio down from 84% to 80% and also, therefore, give us some room to allow that metric to rise somewhat over the near term and really drive great growth and great NIM. Over the longer term, I'd expect to see deposits growing at a very similar rate to loans.
As a follow-up on that, you mentioned discipline in terms of pricing down deposits. It's been a very long time since we've seen a neutral rate of not 0%, right? We might see a neutral rate of 4%. How do you expect deposit competition to evolve in that rate dynamic, especially if loan growth picks back up? And Brant and Scott, if you have differing views in terms of how consumer competition may evolve versus commercial competition for deposits.
I'll give a very brief comment to allow my colleagues sometimes to weigh in. But I think generally speaking, we're seeing a very efficient and rational deposit marketplace. It's, of course, competitive. And our approach is to be incredibly granular to look at that deposit environment on a very segmented basis, both geographically and customer segment, and to use data analytics to really optimize the way we go to market. But let me offer Brant and Scott the opportunity.
No, that's exactly right. We do look at it by rate region. We have a very granular view of rate region. We know exactly what it takes in each of those markets to generate $X in deposits. And it has been rational. Clearly, in each individual market, you could have an individual competitor that may have a unique funding need. But generally, the market overall has been quite rational. We primarily focused on generating new customers. And if we generate new customers, then that ultimately will be what drives deposit growth over the long term.
Yeah, I would agree with that. One thing I would say that we've done that's a little bit different. When rates were at 0%, we built a whole suite of off-balance sheet liquidity tools. So we will have anywhere from $25-$30 billion in liquidity portal and other off-balance-sheet instruments, and what that really did for us is rates went from, to your point, Erika, from 0% to 5%. The hot money we had off-balance sheet, so our underlying core on the balance sheet turned out to be very, very stable, and that has proven to be the case as we bring de novo to Brant's point. We grow our deposits, bringing clients in, but we optimize every client that comes in so that what stays on our sheet tends to be longer durated and stickier.
Got it. And Zach, could you talk a little bit about the growth rate of investment spend? You mentioned it's over two times the rate of total expenses. Maybe unpack what your investment priorities are. And I think in one of the slides, you were giving a scenario analysis for how you were going to think about returns and investments. And you mentioned something called critical long-term investments, right? What are those in terms of what are you working on that you put under that category?
Yeah, thank you, Erika. And I would just reiterate something I actually said last Thursday at Investor Day, which is, in my opinion, the secret sauce of the very strong financial performance that Huntington has generated, not only just in the last two years, but even before that, is the discipline focus we have on consistently re-engineering our baseline costs in order to be able to fund an outsized amount of investment growth. To give you a sense, within the total amount of expenses of the company, the portion that represents investments, which is technology development, marketing, select additions of new personnel, that percentage of expenses has doubled over the last five years. So really punching way above our weight in terms of the ability of the business model to fund offensive expense investments, which translates into all the competitive success that my colleagues have driven to their credit.
If I think about how we drive that model, it's really a very disciplined process to identify growth initiatives to agonize over how we're going to execute on them and make sure that they're as sound and well thought through as possible and then very rigorously executed. The largest share of that investment pool is in technology development. And we fundamentally believe that digital technology, this is about customer-facing applications for products and services, is really the cutting edge of where the competitive environment needs to go. And so that's the largest share of it. But importantly, growing marketing for branding and customer acquisition.
One thing that Brant highlighted very well in his presentation last Thursday at Investor Day was just how successful we have been growing our national brand, which then supports our ability to launch into new states, for example, and really capture a great opportunity that we've done in North and South Carolina and Texas, and then as we grow the business, we also see the ability to hire great new colleagues, and we've seen terrific additions of talented bankers as well. So that's sort of the mix. The lion's share is in digital and technology, but certainly marketing and great colleague acquisition is part of it as well. If I think about what is the critical investments that we would preserve in an environment where we had to reduce expense growth, it's kind of like asking me, Erika, to pick my favorite child. It's difficult to do that.
But I would say that we have a pretty clear view of the things that are absolute must-haves. And it kind of goes back to our strategy. We want to have leading franchises in each of our core customer segments: consumer, small business, and middle market commercial. And we want to drive sustainable long-term growth in our three fee-based businesses: wealth management, payments, and capital markets. So investments that are foundational to those, as opposed to more expansionary, would be the things that we would preserve.
Great. So I want to dive a little bit more deeply into key messages in the consumer and regional bank. But before that, I just wanted to remind the audience, if you do have a question for management, submit it through your UBS mobile conference app, and I'll get it in this iPad right here. So on the DeNovo strategy, you mentioned that you're going to open 100 branches: 55 in the Carolinas, 21 in Colorado. So as we think about the decision tree that management goes through when they've decided it's time to put a branch underground, right? Give us a little bit of a sense of how do you get to the conclusion it's appropriate time to do that?
First of all, when we think about our long-term value proposition, we view that the physical presence of Huntington is an important part of that value proposition. Clearly, our customers engage with us most frequently through digital. But when there's a real problem, when they're looking for advice, to speak to someone who's been there before or someone who may be an expert, our branch network becomes an important avenue for the vast majority of our consumer customers. So the physical presence is important. We have been, for some period of time, rationalizing our existing footprint. So we are increasing our branch footprint incrementally, but there's quite a bit of rationalization underneath that as well. When we think about entry expansion into Colorado or a branch expansion into the Carolinas, one of the things that we measure is something called relative convenience.
So we can look at a marketplace, determine what it requires to establish that level of convenience for customers. And then, as Zach outlined in his comments about investment, that leads us to a pacing of investment. And so when we thought about North and South Carolina, we knew what it would take to build the franchise there. We were able to calculate that. We were able to put a business case against it and then felt that that was a manageable investment over the next five years. What gives us confidence to make that investment has been the performance of the DeNovo branches that we've opened the last several years. We have perfected or are continuing to perfect the marketing that we do around those individual branches, the rigor of our execution around those individual branches.
We've built a very, very detailed playbook that we've learned from as we've opened each one. The payback of those branches that we've opened the last two years has actually been better than we anticipated it would be, and so when you combine that with the early success that we've had in a number of our specialty businesses in both consumer and regional banking and in the commercial bank, that gave us the confidence to then launch into the Carolinas with a significant investment of the franchise, so the branch is one component, but we're also adding other businesses like mortgage or wealth or other components that rely on that physical presence.
So the standard question that investors have asked in the past when trying to assess the DeNovo strategy is, "Oh, how long does it take to get to profitability?" But given your partnership with Scott's team, right? You showed us a map where you had national franchises and SBA offices. How does Huntington measure return on investment in terms of the expansion markets that you've laid out?
Well, we certainly look at payback period. And these specialty businesses, like you just mentioned, SBA, practice finance, the specialty verticals, the auto finance verticals, being able to enter a market and get early traction with those businesses that do not require as much of the physical presence certainly reduces the payback period for the overall investment. And so in Texas, for example, we entered with SBA and practice finance over a year ago. In the Carolinas, we entered with SBA, practice finance, and also in our auto business. And Scott can talk about what we've done with the commercial verticals. We entered before we actually made the decision to launch with a much broader franchise investment. So they certainly allow us to gain some scale before we make the large, significant infrastructure investment.
So how are the Carolinas and Colorado doing? And as you think about seasoning in those markets, what are you learning as you introduce that Huntington brand into those new markets that you'll take away for future expansion?
We're perfecting the playbook for launching a new branch. Every time we launch one, there are things that we learn. There are tactics that work. There are tactics that don't work as well as we intend. And we continue to get better. We're also getting better at presenting ourselves in a very unique way locally in each of those markets. We have been fantastic over many years at analytically driven performance marketing. In fact, we have a fairly significant cost-to-acquire advantage. We're expanding that expertise to also think about what does building a national brand look like for Huntington and how do we efficiently do it.
But then also, given that local is a large component of our value proposition, how do we present ourselves in a way that resonates locally and also sends the message to someone in North or South Carolina or Colorado that we see you? We spent a lot of time on that in Colorado this past year. We shared some examples of that in the Investor Day presentation. We actually, over the course of the last year, saw a 25% increase in unaided awareness for Huntington. So that will clearly help us as we continue to grow there. We're also getting more targeted in how we do performance marketing. So as we enter a new market and we digitally acquire customers, 50% of our customers are acquired digitally, our efforts are very much targeted around the physical footprint that we're building.
So that digital acquisition prowess makes us more efficient and better in places where we have a thinner branch network. It obviously makes us more efficient in places where we already have a well-established network.
Got it. And before I turn it over to Scott, maybe one more question. So Melissa Norton, a relatively new hire for you, essentially laid out a target for nearly doubling your AUM, your wealth AUM, by 2030. Wealth is a business that a lot of your peers are starting to invest more dollars in. How does Huntington stand out and win in such a crowded field?
First of all, regardless of size and regardless of the size of your wealth business, it really comes down to one thing: do customers trust you? That's fundamentally the currency of all of the businesses in financial services, but very specifically the wealth business. The great news for Huntington is we have a customer base that today trusts us. We see this through a number of objective surveys that we do. Specifically, when we look at wealth qualified customers or mass affluent qualified customers, we actually have very high levels of trust and high levels of satisfaction. I view that we can substantially grow the wealth business simply by having more existing Huntington customers have their wealth relationship with us. We've shared for now multiple years that our penetration of our wealth qualified customers was well below what the industry average is.
We've actually increased the number of advisory households 20% in the last two years. And that's led to an annual growth rate of AUM of north of 12%. So we believe we can continue along that same path. We'll continue to update our platform. We'll continue to get better from a model perspective. The quality of advice will continue to improve. But we will continue to leverage the trust that Huntington has with its core customer base.
Thank you, Brant. To Scott at the 2022 Investor Day, the message was, "Add verticals, add specialty verticals, add capabilities." You've done that and more. And that's clearly led to standout growth in commercial loans, deposits, and fees. So in 2028, what is that slide going to look like, right? So in terms of what are your sort of goals in terms of the commercial bank's contribution to the top of the house targets?
Yeah. So let's go back to 2022 Investor Day. Can't wait till the 2028 Investor Day comes, Erika. It's so much fun. We said one to two verticals a year, as she said. And we've done eight. So we're a little bit ahead of ourselves. I tend to think one to two will still be the number between now and 2028. Exactly which ones we'll have something when we have something. But they've been important to us. And the verticals have been important to us because, to Brant's point, when we go in locally, we can bring expertise. And we talked at Investor Day about a differentiated model and how we can deliver expertise locally. But we could also scale our brand nationally. And in fact, that's what's happened. We've kind of gotten the best of both worlds. We got a lot smarter in our legacy markets.
And then we've hired folks in our segment in commercial. Roughly 40% of our colleagues are new since 2022. So we have been able to extend the brand nationally in a way that we haven't before. As far as geographies and other capabilities, we've done the seven MSAs in the Carolinas. We've done the two in Texas. And we've learned a lot from that, especially how well our brand can play. In the Carolinas, we were highly confident. In Texas, it's so big. You have to have conviction, and you have to see how it plays out. And it's played out almost as well for us as it has in the Carolinas. So we will continue to look at markets. And I suspect if we were together in 2028, we will have additional geographies in which we operate.
Importantly, when we look at the commercial bank expanding, our plans don't always include branching. So we very well may be in markets that Brant is considering or is going to consider at some other time. But it's not a prerequisite for us to go into a market with the knowledge that we're going to branch it. Now, in 2028, what percentage of the bank will we be? That's a good question because we're going to grow fast, but I expect Brant's going to grow very fast as well. But we've had, as you guys saw on Investor Day, a very disciplined loan mix in the bank. And I suspect that will continue. And that will continue to be this, what are we, 55%-45%, something like that?
56, 44.
Okay. 56, 44. Thank you.
Just to emphasize that success, I think you mentioned during Investor Day that your middle market expansion strategy in the Carolinas and Texas have or are poised to turn profitable within the first year.
Yeah.
So you mentioned that over the next three years, you'll probably continue to add one to two specialty verticals. What is the pacing for geography?
So, geography, what we do when we look at a geography, we're looking at generally markets that grow faster than GDP, where you have household formation, business creation at accelerated rates. We don't necessarily have a blueprint for all of geography in terms of we have to be in one or two where we desire to. I would describe that going forward, Erika, as more opportunistic for us. But what I would tell you is there are opportunities there for us in a way that maybe we haven't had in the past. So my expectation is we will have additional announcements over time as it relates to geographical expansion.
The ability to expand geographically is in large part driven by the verticals and the capabilities that we bring and the model that we run where we allow our bankers who are local, let's say in Texas or in the Carolinas, to leverage the full capabilities of the company. So their local connectivity gets amplified. And what we've de facto done is almost turned the model on the head. Instead of having everything go out into a national vertical, we maintain that relationship locally. And I think that's done two things. Number one, it's driven the types of results you're talking about. But number two, it's allowed us to attract talent with the type of connectivity that maybe we otherwise wouldn't have been able to do.
Speaking of talent, it's now stuff of legend, at least in the regional banking lore, about how you've hired a lot of talent in 2023 and early 2024. And I thought Tizu's presentation in terms of the sponsor and mortgage ecosystem and the capabilities you could provide was actually a great underrated slide. So my question for you is, do you have the talent to really fulfill all that sponsor ecosystem, the mortgage ecosystem, and that $450 million revenue target for capital markets? Are you still hiring at a good speed?
We will continue to hire. We will not need to hire with the velocity in which we had in 2023 and 2022 going all the way back. I don't expect to have an additional 20% or 25% headcount organically in the segment. We will continue to invest in the ecosystem, certainly. Those pieces have come together in a way that's really served us well, and I do think Tizu's slide, if you haven't seen it in Investor Day, lays that out well. We'll continue to invest as we accelerate in those businesses. In capital markets, we announced Chris Wood is coming to build our leveraged finance platform. We're in those businesses, but we're not connected in the way we want to with all the clients we want to be connected with.
I think, as you know, as you go into those spaces, you want that long track record of success and expertise as we move into institutional leveraged finance and the like at Huntington. I do believe as we build that out, Erika, we may have a few asset classes on the trading side, but we're on the right trajectory for $450 million. We actually talked about $600 million in 2030. We'll need a few more people for that. We put in a lot of the groundwork, and we're comfortable with where we are.
Maybe.
That's good.
Yeah. Just maybe double-click on the payments opportunity. I think you're also targeting 10% plus treasury management growth. How well penetrated is TM among your middle market and SMB clients?
Yeah, so in the middle market, it's actually very well penetrated. We measure primacy. Everybody measures primacy to a certain extent. Even with that, though, the biggest opportunity we have is deepening in the existing book.
Got it.
Amit at Investor Day talked about merchant. We brought that in-house. Very large opportunity for us as well. So when we think about treasury management payments, it's a critical part of what we do. It's a critical part of what we measure. And I'm quite confident that we're going to get there. Our platform has what we need to be successful.
Got it.
I would mention just on the SMB space, first of all, the strength of the acquisition engine is an important driver of the payments revenue. So the better job we can do of generating new relationships to the company, the faster that number is going to grow. In our core regional bank, we actually have fairly high penetration of treasury into our commercial customers. And we've done a good job of doing that with the national businesses like SBA and practice finance and auto. We believe the 350,000 businesses that are under 5 million in revenue, having a very unique value proposition for that customer base is also a massive payments opportunity. So all of our investment in that space is all payments-oriented. And that is a space we believe we could own.
Got it. Maybe Zach pulling back up. You did have a slide that said scale and scope is a secondary strategic priority, but competitive positioning is a primary priority. Can you talk about why Huntington doesn't look at that as one and the same? And also, what's more important to your board, scale or culture?
Great questions. In our view, we obviously want to be in businesses that have a threshold of scale that can be competitive, that can have good economics. But scale in and of itself is not the primary driver. It's really where do we think we can win in the marketplace, grow at above-average rates, and have a sustainable growth path. And so I will note, Erika, that on that slide, every one of those factors was important. I wouldn't have put them on there if they weren't. But in ordinal ranking to us, what's really critical is we have threshold scale in businesses that we've got competitive advantage in, for sure. I think it's a simple answer in your second question. What's more important, culture or scale? Culture. Culture, culture, culture. The thing we have built at Huntington, a premium franchise. And that is a very hard one over time.
And ultimately, what underpins it is the culture of the company. It comes through in service, in trust, in the ability to execute. And so culture is everything. It's really what has brought not only the success we've had, but also a lot of the new things we're doing. Ultimately, it's people that execute them. And the people we've been able to attract very much are drawn to us. We are pulling talent in. And it's something we're really proud of.
Zach, in this vein, you mentioned during Investor Day that you pulled out 45% of the cost from TCF, which is much bigger than the usual deal math that we've seen in the past. And then from an organic standpoint, I think you mentioned in our previous meeting that when you came in, you were able to optimize costs and reallocate it to revenue-producing costs. So as we think about these remarkable numbers, especially at 45%, what have you learned from integration or just maybe the technology and operations from a standalone basis that you could take into the future?
Sure. The TCF acquisition, as we noted, was incredibly successful on lots of fronts. Cost reduction was one of them. Revenue synergies also were very powerful. We had a lot of confidence we would get revenue synergies. And we certainly have done that also. If I think about the ability for us, just the infrastructure and capabilities we have to manage expenses is exceptionally good. And we have a very scalable technology platform. Some 20% of those TCF cost synergies were simply taking the TCF business and porting it onto the Huntington technology stack, which is incredibly efficient and scalable. And so that was certainly something that we anticipated we'd be able to do and is an absolute proof point that we were able to do that. I think we've also put into place a very effective regional structure with Brant's leadership and Scott as well.
And so the ability to bring in that business and put it into the regional structure that we've got with all of the clear organizational definition and kind of ways of working also unlocks significant ability to take costs out there. So good proof point of how well we can install that system into the TCF acquisition. As we go forward, as we've noted, our focus is organic growth. And we'll just continue that program of systematically re-engineering our cost space, driving process automation and simplification, and leveraging numerous other tools for expense management to drive efficiency that ultimately then funnels back into investment capacity that helps us to drive that revenue, which is, again, three-quarters of the profit growth model.
So we're at the two-minute warning. Let's go to the lightning round. Maybe for each of you, what is the one message that you really want to reiterate from Investor Day from either your business or Zach at the top of the house that you want to really repeat that you think that investors should take away?
OkayF. I'll start. First of all, we're incredibly focused on our customers. We're focused on acquiring new customers, ensuring that we organize the bank to serve them best, to create very unique value propositions. And we believe that focus has already led to growth that is standout and industry-leading. And we believe the approach that we've taken is scalable.
I said it before. I'll say it again. We've built a premium franchise and are executing exceptionally well. Over the last two years, we've outgrown the peers by 10% in loans, 10% in deposits. Coincidentally, we've also grown fees last year at 10%, up 2% as a percent of revenue. And so the model is working. And we have every expectation that we'll continue to outperform as we go over the next several years.
I would just say on the commercial side, we're incredibly well-positioned for growth and continued growth and that over the last four to five years, we've changed the trajectory of what's possible. So I think we're just scratching the surface on what we're capable of doing.
That's awesome. Since there are no questions on the iPad, we're going to wrap it up here. Huntington, thank you, guys.
Great. Thank you.