Hello, and welcome to the 2025 Annual Meeting of Shareholders of Huntington Bancshares Incorporated. During the meeting, we'll have a question-and-answer session. You can submit questions or comments at any time by clicking on the Q&A icon on the right-hand side of the meeting center screen. It is now my pleasure to turn today's meeting over to Steve Steinour, Chairman, President, and CEO of Huntington Bancshares Incorporated. Mr. Steinour, the floor is yours.
Welcome, everyone. Welcome, everyone, to the 2025 Annual Meeting of Shareholders of Huntington Bancshares Incorporated. I am Steve Steinour, as indicated, and I'm pleased that all of you are joining us today for our virtual shareholder meeting. Thank you for your support. I'd like to introduce members of our board who are in attendance today and standing for election this year, in addition to myself: Tannie Crane, Rafael Diaz-Granados, Chris Inglis, Allie Kline, Rick Neu, Ken Phelan, Dave Porteous, Teresa Shea, Roger Sit, Jeffrey Tate, and Gary Torgow. Members of Huntington's executive leadership team are also joining us. I'd like to thank especially our four directors who are with us today, who are not standing for reelection. They've just been outstanding: Alanna Cotton, Gina France, Mike Hochschwender, and Rick King. As the Chairman of today's meeting, I now call the meeting to order.
This meeting will be conducted in accordance with the meeting agenda and the rules of conduct. The meeting agenda and rules of conduct are available online by clicking the documents icon. If you need a copy of the annual report or the proxy statement, these are also available under the documents icon. David Detrick of Computershare Trust Company is in attendance and will act as the inspector of election for this meeting. The Corporate Secretary, duly appointed proxies, and representatives of PricewaterhouseCoopers are also in attendance. This meeting was called by our Board of Directors, which set February 18, 2025, as the record date for the holders of shares of our common stock entitled to receive notice of and vote at this meeting.
The notice of meeting and proxy statement were first mailed or made available on March 6, 2025, to the holders of our common stock as of the record date. I've been advised by the corporate secretary that at least the majority of the company's issued and outstanding shares of common stock entitled to vote are represented in person or by proxy at today's meeting. Accordingly, a quorum is present, allowing us to conduct today's business. I'll address questions, if any, about the proposals after they're presented. You may submit questions online by clicking on the Q&A icon. Out of consideration for others, we request that shareholders limit themselves to one question or comment. We'll now turn to the proposals to be presented for a vote of the shareholders. If you've already voted and do not wish to change your vote, no further action is needed.
On the other hand, if you've not voted or wish to change your vote, you may do so now by clicking on the vote icon. For this year's annual meeting, we have three proposals to be voted upon. Proposal one is the election of 12 directors to serve a one-year term expiring at the 2026 annual meeting. Proposal two, typically referred to as a say on pay, pertains to approval on an advisory, non-binding basis of the executive compensation as disclosed in the proxy statement. Proposal three is to ratify the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers as the independent registered public accounting firm for the company for 2025. The proposals are described in the proxy statement. Our board of directors recommends that shareholders vote for the election of each nominee for director listed in proposal one and for proposals two and three.
I'd like to ask Tim Sedabres, Director of Investor Relations, if there are any questions specific to the proposals.
Thank you, Steve. At this point, there are no questions related to the proposals.
No questions. Thank you, Tim. We're going to pause a moment to allow shareholders who may not have voted to vote. Thank you. The polls are now closed. The inspector has issued a preliminary report and informed me that each of the nominees for the board of directors has been elected, the say on pay resolution has been approved, and the appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for 2025 has been ratified. Based on the preliminary report of the inspector, I declare the proposals one, two, and three are approved. The final results of the vote will be recorded in the minutes of the meeting and will appear in the current report on the Form 8-K that the company will file within four business days of this meeting. This concludes the formal business portion of the meeting.
Now I'd like to offer some comments, and then we'll proceed to your questions, if any. Before we begin, I'd like to direct your attention to our safe harbor statement on slide four. I will make some forward-looking statements today in my presentation, so I ask that you please review this slide. Now let's start on slide five. Thank you again for joining us for the 2025 annual shareholder meeting. Today, I'm going to discuss an overview of 2024 performance with our first quarter earnings release coming out just tomorrow, April 17th. I, unfortunately, must limit my comments to 2024. However, I encourage you all to dial in for our earnings release on Thursday morning at 11:00 A.M. Eastern Time. Following the presentation, I'll close with a general question-and-answer session. The executive leadership and team and I welcome your questions and insights, and the webcast will provide that opportunity.
You can submit your questions at any time during my presentation by clicking on the Q&A icon, and our investor relations director will pose those questions to us on your behalf. Now let's turn to slide six. As many of you know, we hosted an Investor Day in February this year where we highlighted a bold vision for the next phase of Huntington's journey to be the most people-first, customer-centered bank in the country. We believe that by continuing to build a powerful people-first culture, we'll deliver a differentiated customer experience. In pursuit of this vision, we have four key guiding attributes: be the most trusted financial institution, second, further enhance our exceptionally caring and inclusive culture, third, be an indispensable partner for our customers, and finally, deliver value through top quartile performance.
We believe that a company with a strong culture, a strong sense of purpose, and an engaged workforce is one where our customers will want to bank. We are confident that this customer-centered approach, combined with our capabilities, positions us for consistent top quartile performance. I'll now turn to slide seven. 2024 was an exceptional year. Our team's accelerated growth over the course of the year. We achieved record fee revenues and attractive returns supported by our investments in new geographies and capabilities. We expanded into new geographies in North Carolina and South Carolina, as well as Texas. Additionally, we added eight new commercial verticals with roughly 60 new colleagues in those verticals. These investments are delivering exceptional results, and we are seeing accelerated contributions from these new areas. Our growth in 2024 accelerated over the course of the year.
Average deposits grew by $7.5 billion and average loans by over $3.5 billion. Our fee revenue business has performed exceptionally well. Within payments, we brought in-house our merchant acquiring capabilities and increased our treasury management products and services. Within wealth management, we expanded advisory household relationships and gathered wealth assets from our customers. Capital markets had a record year, largely driven by our Capstone Advisory Team. The organic growth we are driving continues to outpace our peer group, and we have strong momentum to drive further revenue and PPNR growth as we move into 2025. Moving to slide eight, you can see our focus on executing our organic growth strategies resulted in a differentiated growth profile across assets, loans, and deposits. We're acquiring customers, deepening relationships, and implementing the other key elements of our plan to drive long-term value creation and win in the marketplace.
At year-end, at $204 billion in assets, we're a top-10 regional bank in the U.S. Huntington delivered $2.9 billion in pre-provision net revenue, which reflected the contributions from both existing businesses and our investments in new geographies and capabilities, combined with disciplined expense management. Turning to slide nine, the results of our accelerated loan growth continue to be a differentiated position compared to peers, and Huntington outperformed the median peers by 7.5%. Importantly, we have sustained deposit growth to self-fund our expanded loan balances, with average deposit growth also outperforming median peers by 6.5%. Turning to slide ten, we've continued to see powerful acceleration from our focus on our three strategic fee businesses. For the full year, fee revenues as a percentage of total revenues increased to 28% from 26% the prior year.
Within payments, we saw 6% growth for the full year, benefited from higher treasury management fees and the launch of our new merchant acquiring model. Wealth management fees increased by 11% over the year, driven by growth in AUM and wealth advisory households. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, capital markets had a record year led by our Capstone Group, which had a phenomenal fourth quarter. Turning this now to slide 11, the top half of the slide, we see our total shareholder return, or TSR, over the three, five, and ten years relative to our peer group. TSR is the price appreciation of the common shares, assuming reinvestment of dividends. Our cumulative total shareholder return has outperformed the peer median in all three of these time periods. On the bottom half of the slide, we provide an update on our capital activities during 2024.
We continue to be dynamic in our capital allocation, returning over $900 million in capital to our shareholders through dividends for $0.62 on an annualized basis. Turning to slide 12, credit quality continues to perform very well. Net charge-offs were 30 basis points for the year, well within our through-the-cycle range, and our allowance for credit losses ended the year at 1.88%. Please join us tomorrow morning, April 17th at 11:00 A.M., for our first quarter earnings call to check in and hear about how we are executing on our vision in 2025 to be the leading people-first, customer-centered bank in the country. We now have some time for shareholders to ask questions. Tim, will you review the procedures for this Q&A period, please?
Thank you, Steve. We always welcome the views, comments, and questions of our shareholders. To ensure that this session is meaningful and constructive, we ask that questions and remarks be limited to those of concern or interest to all shareholders. Matters which are of personal or individual nature generally may be raised by contacting investor relations. Shareholders may also review the full rules of conduct, which are available by clicking on the documents icon. As mentioned at the beginning of the meeting, you may submit questions online by clicking the Q&A icon. At this point, we have a question submitted. The question is related to, has Huntington explored geographic expansion opportunities into additional states?
The answer to that is yes, but we have a lot to do. We announced a 55-branch expansion in North Carolina and South Carolina. That is well underway. You will hear more about that on the earnings call tomorrow. There is the potential for us to do further investment and expansion beyond that.
Thank you. At this time, there are no further questions.
Thanks, Tim. This concludes the Q&A period. As appropriate, we'll try to respond directly to questions that were not answered here today. Thank you for joining us today for our 2025 annual meeting of shareholders. On behalf of the board, executive leadership team, and Huntington's colleagues, we're grateful for your continued support. Thank you. I now declare this meeting adjourned. Have a great day.
This concludes the meeting. You may now disconnect.