Next up, we have Huntington Bancshares. From Huntington, we have Chairman, CEO, and President Steve Steinour, and CFO Zach Wasserman. So thank you both for being here. Delighted to have you. And Steve has some prepared remarks, so I'll hand it over to you, Steve.
Thank you.
Thank you. You're welcome.
Thank you very much, and BofA for hosting us today. Welcome to all of you. Appreciate your interest in Huntington today. As you know, Zach will answer most of the questions, certainly all the hard ones, our CFO, but before we get started, if you could look at page two, the forward-looking statements we'll make today, so I want to begin with a few comments related to our strategy and recent initiatives, then we'll turn it back to Ebrahim for a Q&A. Starting on slide three now. At our investor day in November, we outlined five messages which summarize Huntington and our strategy. First, the culture of the company is embedded throughout the bank, and it resonates. This is where we're looking to engage our colleagues, and we believe this is a differentiator for us. It's how we've accumulated multi-years of J.D. Power and other awards because of their engagement.
There's a lot of emphasis on colleagues and the culture of the company, and that's how we're delivering our organic growth initiatives. Second, these colleagues also have built a powerful brand. We overviewed it in the Investor Day. Number one in trust, leading Net Promoter Score, number one, affinity to switch banks. There are multiple dimensions of this. Those are just some of the consumer scores. TM and Commercial Banking and others, wealth would have equivalencies. Again, our colleagues, back to our colleagues, culture, and then their performance driving the brand, creating the brand we work with today. Third, we're well balanced between consumer and commercial, one of the few regionals that have built this. As we've more than tripled the bank over the last decade or so, we've sustained this balance. We've got a broad set of businesses. We overviewed those in the Investor Day.
I think we surprised some of you with the reach and scale of some of those businesses, but they're in a great position to sustain our organic growth as we move forward. And many of these businesses are complemented by the substantial new revenue synergies that are opportunities coming to us from TCF. Fourth, we're operators at the core. The management team are operators. We have a track record of execution, two larger deals in 12 years that have been successfully integrated, and that's all against the culture of accountability. And finally, we're uniquely positioned, we believe, to deliver substantial value creation for our shareholders. We're pleased to have updated our medium-term financial targets at the investor day, and we believe these targets, PPNR growth, positive operating leverage, and a top-tier return on capital, are directly aligned with shareholder value creation. So you got five or six slides here.
We'll turn now to slide four. 2022 was a remarkable year for us. We got the expenses from TCF. We got the revenue growth and lift that we wanted, and we entered this year with strong momentum in the business lines. We're operating from a position of strength with clearly defined strategic priorities, and our teams remain focused on driving sustained organic growth consistent with our risk appetite. You've all heard us talk about aggregate, moderate to low risk appetite now for many years. Now, as for the macroeconomic environment, we said at the investor day we were operating with three scenarios, and we remain cautious given the significant ongoing uncertainty in the economic trends and geopolitical events. As we've noted, we're preparing for multiple scenarios. That's why we are proactively taking steps to outperform should the economic conditions soften further later this year.
Now, as we planned, we've grown capital, and last month we were pleased to announce a $1 billion share repurchase authorization, which provides us with capital flexibility as we go forward. Our loan loss reserve coverage is robust. It's at the top end of our peer group, and we expect it to stay robust as we move forward. Having said that, credit continues to perform very well. We benefit from a well-diversified portfolio split almost evenly between consumer and commercial. And in consumer, we focus on super prime and prime portfolios. On the commercial side, we have strong customer, industry, and geographic diversification, as well as a long history of disciplined customer selection. Since the overhaul of credit in 2009, when I joined, credit has become a strength of Huntington, and I believe this will continue to be a differentiator for us.
I believe very strongly this will continue to be a differentiator for us. Most of my background, my career was in credit, so I have confidence in our position, our posture, and our relative performance. Now, these factors give us confidence in our ability to continue to execute on our organic growth priorities while holding true to this aggregate, moderate to low risk appetite through the cycle. With our breadth of businesses and markets we cover, we see opportunities within our risk appetite to deliver growth over the course of 2023 and certainly well beyond that. So with this backdrop, we're executing our plan for 2023. In many ways, it's a continuation of what we've spoken about over the last year. We're going to continue to invest in sustainable revenue growth initiatives, which we believe will deliver growth for many years to come.
At the same time, given the operating environment we're in, we're dynamically and proactively managing expenses. We are taking numerous actions to manage the overall expense growth of the bank while ensuring we're sustaining the investment capacity for our most critical priorities. Onto slide five. I want to highlight a few of these efficiency initiatives underway. Collectively, these actions are guided by our commitment to an annual positive operating leverage. First, Operation Accelerate is a key program for us. We highlighted this at investor day. We're trying to simplify and automate our major customer processes, giving customers, through our digital capabilities, the ability to self-service, obtain their information, make their selections, all of which will reduce some of our mid and backroom operating areas in terms of headcount and make us more efficient.
Importantly, we're also seeing where we're getting increasing revenue as a consequence of some of these changes. Then second, we continue to optimize the branch network as we have for many years. We completed the consolidation of 30 branches this quarter, representing 3% of the network. These efficiencies support reinvestment in digital capabilities, as well as some new branch additions in growth markets like Denver, where we've announced plans to open over 20 locations over the next several years. Third, we launched a voluntary retirement program intended for our middle and senior-level colleagues, our managers. This was offered to colleagues in late January, and we expect to be able to share more on the efficiencies this will create and the associated restructuring expense in the coming months. We've never done a voluntary retirement program, so we just don't have the ability to project it.
Finally, last month on our earnings call, we indicated that we'll be taking actions to align our organization structure with a focus on our most critical priorities. And we've made the decision to make some changes to our organization and reporting segments. If you turn to slide six, let me share a few highlights from these changes. Today, we're organized around four business segments. Commercial Banking, Consumer and Business Banking, Vehicle Finance, and Regional Banking, and our Private Client Group. Going forward, we will consolidate these four revenue segments into two during the month of April by moving our Vehicle Finance and Private Client Group into our Consumer Banking segment and renaming that as Consumer and Regional Banking. These changes will strengthen the alignment of our business units to our core strategic principles while enhancing the focus on our Regional Banking model. This is really important.
The changes are going to strengthen the alignment of our operating business units to our core strategic priorities while enhancing the focus on our Regional Banking model. We're committed to local, bringing the decision-making and customer service closer to our customers and the communities across our footprint. The change will double down on that commitment, increasing the coordination of our business units on a regional basis to better serve customers. Now, additionally, this consolidation will bring enhanced agility and speed of execution, which we believe will support even greater growth opportunities over time. The new Consumer and Regional Banking segment will become a fully integrated organization, inclusive of all Consumer and Business Banking products and services across the bank.
As we shared at Investor Day, growing primary bank customer relationships is at the heart of our performance, and we believe this change is directly aligned with this objective. Excuse me. One example of this within our consumer-related businesses is a stronger alignment of our advisory initiatives for mass affluent and affluent customers who bridge between our retail brokerage services and our private bank. By aligning these business units within one segment, we're bringing all of our wealth management activities under a central team within the new consumer and regional bank segment. Additionally, the reorg is expected to provide efficiency opportunities as we can better support these revenue segments with scalable and efficient middle and back office support, as well as corporate support functions.
Now, onto slide seven, we have a long track record of investing in our most critical revenue-producing initiatives, and our outlook for 2023 contemplates continuing on that pathway. The disciplined expense management I mentioned earlier provides us with the capacity to self-fund these initiatives, allowing us to grow investments at a consistent, solid pace, even as we hold the growth rate of overall expenses to low levels. These investments are centered in the areas of technology development, marketing, and revenue-producing personnel additions. Now, we've highlighted here a few of the select initiatives underway for 2023 across these three categories, which are included within our current guidance and operating plan for the year. Three of these I'd call out. First, excuse me, the continued growth in technology development investments focused on digital capabilities. And we discussed this at investor day. We've doubled the tech dev investment between 2019 and 2022.
In 2023, we're going to continue to grow that tech development at roughly a 20% level with a focus on delivering numerous new products and services across consumer and commercial businesses, including what's coming through Operation Accelerate. Second, the investment into customer acquisition and brand-building spend or investment is fueling sustained growth in primary bank relationships and ultimately core deposits, loans, and value-added fee revenues. Our digital marketing and personalized delivery initiatives continue to drive growth in our customer base and have become our leading customer acquisition channel. We believe this type of innovation is imperative to sustaining our brand strength and leveraging the power of our overall digital product set. T hen third is the continued addition of key revenue-producing personnel.
Over the past year, we added substantive resources to areas such as Business Banking, Practice Finance, as well as the build-out of expanded markets in the Twin Cities and Denver. For 2023, we'll continue to add key talent primarily within our specialty Commercial Banking verticals, where we have tremendous growth opportunities, as well as we build out our Climate Finance team, both of which we highlighted on the investor day. The Climate Finance team is on track to fully onboard nearly a dozen colleagues by the end of this quarter and have built a pipeline of over $500 million year to date. Excuse me. Turning to slide eight, you heard these themes at investor days, and they summarize well our messages from today. We're continuing to invest to drive sustainable, profitable growth in the areas of strategic focus we outlined.
We're going to continue to differentiate through our leading brand trust and customer experience, and we're taking proactive actions in order to optimize the bank for sustained top quartile performance in a range of economic scenarios. So with those remarks, let me turn it over to Ebrahim for the Q&A session, and thank you again. Ebrahim.
Thank you. So I guess maybe one question we all had, Steve, for you is, how many hours do you sleep? Well, I'm just a show horse, so the executive team works very hard and well as a team. No, thank you. I guess I had a few questions following up on the org restructure, but maybe before we get to that, you mentioned about the macro outlook, three scenarios under which you're operating. Just give us a flavor of what's happening underlying within your markets, the manufacturing economy?
We were talking about the Intel plant. So there's some secular themes that are playing out. I'd love to start there.
Sure. The underlying economy is actually performing quite well. I'll spend a minute on Intel if you'd like, but there's terrific investment in expansion of businesses or new businesses just this week. Ford made a $3.5 billion commitment with a partner to a new plant in West Michigan. So things are happening literally every week somewhere in our footprint, in the primary footprint in the Midwest. Like, what we see, I'm out routinely talking to customers and other businesses, and there's a lot of confidence in the year ahead. There is. So there's not a cliff event. They're not expecting a cliff event.
Having said that, there is a rationalization of investments that are occurring that are, I think, resulting in some deferrals of some of the investment programs or maybe a sale of a company or other activities. There's just too much volatility and uncertainty at the moment, but the underlying is still very strong. Consumers in good shape. These businesses are generally in very good shape. Even in the softer areas like home building, home builders will generally tell you they can't get enough labor. T hat's a uniform comment. Any business, they just can't get enough labor. Intel, by the way, is a game changer for Central Ohio. It's a fabulous company. What they're doing there is remarkable. And we're very, very fortunate to have landed that. It'll be the largest chipmaking region in the world as they fulfill.
It'll take years, maybe a decade or more, but as they fulfill and put eight, 10, or more chip plants, chip fab plants in there, you're going to see $100 billion plus of investment just from Intel.
Got it. I guess when you think about, as you mentioned, deferrals of investments, I think your loan growth guidance is about 5%-7% for the year. How do you think about the drivers of loan growth this year? Any big difference between what's going to be driving it this year versus last?
Well, we have a number of really strong asset-generating businesses. We're number five in Equipment Finance nationally. We're top 10 in asset-based lending. We're, I think, number two in Distribution Finance. So we've got 13,000 distributors that we were Husqvarna, a number of those, snowmobiles, yard garden equipment, a host of those that we work with nationally.
They have depleted inventories, so they'll restock their inventory. We're a big auto floor plan lender, as you know. That will be a tailwind. There's still a massive amount of stimulus dollars not yet released out of the most recent couple of programs. I think it's around $1 trillion of tailwind that will go into these different industries and government entities yet to be realized. Then the Midwest will have its proportionate share or better of those as we go forward. I see a lot of room for continued economic growth. It may be marginal, but I don't see anything that says a steep drop-off. We're trying to play offense and defense simultaneously here. We're taking expenses out to be contingently ready. We're reinvesting a portion of those, but we're going to take some to the bottom line as well.
So the program referenced this morning, the four to two revenue segments, is an example. The branch consolidation is another example. The voluntary retirement program, a third example. There are other things in addition to those three that we're also working on. And as the year unfolds, we'll share those.
Understood. And just given sort of your exposure across businesses, supply chain issues, are those more or less settled, and now it's just about?
There are still some supply chain issues, but they're generally getting resolved. People are sometimes taking cars and rationalizing that they don't have the seat warmer, but that's okay, or the steering wheel warmer. And the OEMs, I think, are finding that not all of the bells and whistles or toys within these vehicles and other types of manufacturing that are chip constrained, you're able to operate without them.
I guess when you bring it to Huntington, how do you see the, I'm not sure if you can quantify where those inventories are across Equipment Finance, dealer floor plan, and what would be normal relative to where people are?
I could take that one. As we've seen, as Steve noted, just the three legs of the stool in terms of commercial loan growth opportunity for us, there's our specialty verticals that Steve referenced in his prepared remarks. There's the asset Equipment Finance business, but this line utilization, being the third of those legs, is really driving significant growth. It drove growth last year. We expect it to continue to drive growth in loans as we go into 2023. I t's really three big buckets. Our general middle market line utilization has essentially returned now to pre-COVID levels. So that was over the course of last year.
We've gotten to that level. On our Vehicle Floor Plan business, the Auto Finance Space, that was trending, to give you a sense. Excuse me, pre-COVID levels of utilization might be sort of 65%. It had reached 30% by the middle of 2022. It was already back to 45% by the end of 2022. We think that could very well recover back to pre-COVID levels over the course of the next four to five quarters, so that's still an ongoing tailwind, which will drive growth, and then our Distribution Finance business, this is the relationship we have with 13,000 dealers throughout the United States of small ticket, home and garden, personal motorcraft, and things of this nature, and those supply chains have improved as well.
And so that line utilization is essentially almost back to pre-COVID levels and yet continues to grow even just as the business grows and as we continue to expand the network. So of the three, Auto Finance has the most room to go, but all of them are showing encouraging signs.
And I think you mentioned at the Investor Day that a lot of your clients are consolidators, and they're acquiring other auto dealers, so that probably helps too.
Yes, it does.
I guess maybe going back to the org restructuring, Steve, you obviously had the Investor Day in November. Give us a sense of the catalyst behind this move, and if you can unpack some of the benefits both on the expense and the revenue side around go-to-market strategies. I assume all of that becomes a lot faster. Well, this is principally a revenue play.
There will be some expense benefit from it, but it's principally a revenue play. I think all of us who were talking about revenue production at that investor day talked about being local in the context of the Regional Banking activities, and we have a very embedded, strong belief that delivering locally, it's about relationships and people. You think about our vision, people first, digitally powered, really important. As we were working through the strategic planning process beginning last summer, we started asking ourselves, are we as aligned as we'd like to have our wealth businesses so that we're maximizing opportunities? We see this as a big growth area for us going forward. We are underpenetrated and have been, we have been, and while we've made some progress, it's not coming fast enough from my perspective, so this alignment, I think, helps us significantly in that regard.
Also, as we drive more and more through our digital channels, digital and business banking, digital and commercial banking, digital and wealth and consumer, we're getting to where our touchpoints in branches and others locally are just they don't need us as much. They don't need as many touchpoints. And we want that for efficiency and other reasons. But to swim against that tide, we believe this local empowerment will be a very important and differentiated factor where our Regional Presidents and their teams will all be aligned to make sure we're maximizing OCR, maximizing our customer relationships, which are always about being local.
Got it. And from my experience, things like this require some tweaking in leadership and in teams. Does that require any sense of hiring of the right people as you rejigger the Regional Banking focus?
We have a lot of talented colleagues, so this is not going to be a hiring binge that opens up on this. In fact, one of our challenges is we have enough talent, and how do we maximize the opportunities for those that are going to be part of our growth and success for years to come? That's why the voluntary retirement program. There is a logic to the steps we're taking to position the company during the first half of this year, coming off of four PPNR record quarters and the momentum we had coming in, to taking the action now and setting us up for, I think, the next long-term run. The last time we did a reorg like this was in 2009. This is really significant for us.
I guess maybe in terms of the PPNR and the expense, I think when we were out in December, you talked about there's a pathway to kind of grind and deliver positive operating leverage. Just talk to us about the medium-term opportunities to bring down expenses, improving efficiencies.
Yeah, let me take that one. I think sort of I'll extend on some of the comments that Steve made in his prepared remarks, which is the overall model is to grow total expenses at less than revenue, less than the growth rate of revenue, drive positive operating leverage, and ultimately to funnel those expense capacity into the investment categories that Steve mentioned earlier to really be on the front foot. I mean, I don't want to bury the headline.
20% CAGR over the last three years in those offensive-oriented expense investments is very significant to our growth and to our strategic positioning. That's what fuels the growth. But it's all funded by essentials efficiency programs. So there's a number I would call out. One that we didn't call out in the prepared remarks, but it is very significant, is that our run-the-bank costs in technology, not development, but the run-the-costs of tech and run-costs of operations, we typically hold to a low single-digit growth rate, even as revenues are handily above that. So that throws off a lot of benefits of scale and efficiency improvement. The second one is some of these systematic programs that we're doing. So in our retail branch distribution network, we've got about 1,000 points of presence. They're still very relevant, still a really important acquisition channel.
Over time, there's an opportunity to pluck the least productive nodes out of that network and generate net economics. That's what we're doing. Our expectation was to reduce about 2% per year out of the branch network on a go-forward basis, very consistent with what we've done in the past. This year, it'll be 3%, to give you a sense. We're finding economics there that we can drive that efficiency. Operation Accelerate is going back and looking systematically at our top customer-facing processes. The term is user journey from customer prospecting to acquisition to onboarding to servicing, etc. As we go through and systematically find ways to automate, simplify, drive efficiencies in those processes, we're finding. I think in our Investor Day, we highlighted $150 million of profit opportunity in just those first 2021 journeys.
And it's about half from expense and half from revenue, actually. We're seeing a lot of benefits, both in terms of reduced cost and increased productivity in that program. And then you add that to what we've just been talking about now in terms of the organizational alignment, which is primarily about strategy and revenue, but will drive some net efficiencies as well. And so those are the kind of things we'll do. And our line of sight to continuing to operate that play exists over the course of our medium-term horizon. It's a very important part of the medium-term PPNR goal we gave. In fact, I mentioned it yesterday. It's about a third of that between 6% and 9% PPNR growth we expect to come from ongoing efficiency gains.
That's helpful. Thank you. And maybe just pivoting to more issues near-term, deposit liquidity, obviously a big area of focus. You, I think, outperformed the industry last year, and your guidance still expects continued growth. Just give us a sense of, are we getting to a point where Fed funds at four, five, finally leads to a lot bigger push within your customer base for higher rates and how that's kind of informing strategy for growth?
Sure. Yeah, we were very encouraged and pleased with the outcome of our strategy to gather deposits during 2022. We saw three consecutive quarters of deposit growth, whereas the industry was under clearly writ large a lot of pressure on deposits. And everything we're seeing right now continues to corroborate that we'll continue to grow deposits throughout the course of 2023 in line with the guidance we've given, which is between 1% and 4%. In that growth, it's weighted higher to commercial, but consumer will also grow.
The momentum we're seeing in the consumer business right now, which we saw in Q4, it's continuing on at the early part of this quarter as well. [We] could see consumer even growing better than that in the near term. So it's pretty encouraging. Coming to the nature of your question, it's clearly a very competitive environment right now. Very competitive environment. And we're seeing the mixed shifts, as you would expect, to the higher interest rate categories. With that being said, it's still very rational. I wouldn't characterize it as a major trajectory. It's fairly consistently competitive as we stand today. And all of the trends we're seeing continue to corroborate both our volume outlook and our cost and beta outlook.
When you think about, I think at the investor day, what stuck with me was just 3x household growth over the last 10 years, primacy of relationships with these deposit customers. When we think about acquisition tools to bring in deposits today, is it the payments business on the commercial side? Are the CDs on the consumer? What's driving that growth?
Fundamentally, it all comes back to our strategy, which is to grow primary bank relationships, to drive concerted and systematic acquisition of consumers, business banking, and commercial clients, and then to deepen those relationships with multiple products and ultimately to get often the payments flows from those customers so you can really win primary and operating account status for each of those segments. That's the strategy, and that's where it's really working. I would say on the consumer side, we're seeing very strong levels of consumer acquisition.
January was an incredibly strong month, and we expect that to continue. That's bearing fruit in terms of additional deposit gathering and also the deepening efforts that we have. We put a lot of investments both in our branch network and in our digital distribution capabilities to gather more deposits and to have a very effective channel, and that's working. On the commercial side, treasury management is a major focus for us, not only to grow fee revenues, but importantly to be operating account status. That's where we're seeing significant successes as well.
I'll add on that, if I can, Ebrahim. We distinguish consumer products, deposit products for more than a decade. We've had great customer service year in, year out, J.D. Power and other awards. We've got the service side right. We've got distinguished product. What we have found with our marketing technology investment is we now have a much deeper reach using digital tools, and so you've got reach in new channels and personalization that are helping to drive the consumer side. On the business front, as you know, we're number one SBA. We're a very large, small business bank.
Our deposits are a multiple of our loans outstanding in that business banking arena as a consequence of year-in-year-out performance. Again, our digital tools are starting to open up that channel even more for us, and they're just coming on board. We've just started with Mobile for Business last year, so we have more reach, more connectivity, more personalization on the consumer side, and more TM focus on even the small business side, making it easier. Think of Amazon like ease of doing business. That's our goal with Project Accelerate. And early signs are quite positive.
I think there's maybe one more on outcome management and balance sheet strategies, like hedging. You and the Fed's hiking. You're talking about what happens when rates get cut. And I think, Zach, you've talked about you're kind of in a good place hedging-wise. Remind us where you are. What other actions do you expect to take to protect the margin from lower rates as you think about managing to that PP&R sort of target?
Yeah, clearly, it's been a pretty dynamic and strong environment here for the last several quarters. It continues to be so. We think we've got the longer-term hedging protection program essentially right at this point. We're not significantly adding to it. There may be opportunities over time to tweak at the margins and optimize to generate a little less upfront cost for the longer-term protection that we're getting.
But we think we've generally got the program set as of now. There may be opportunities to extend it over time as well as we go throughout the course of the year, but we'll see. On our securities portfolio, we don't see any significant need to reposition or change. We think it'll stay approximately the same size in proportion to the balance sheet. And so we'll grow as assets grow, as loans grow. And generally speaking, with respect to NIM, our goal is the same as we've said for a while, to blunt the volatility as much as possible in the outcomes around NIM for the next several years, to create as tight a corridor as we can for where NIM will trend, and ultimately to generate a top-tier NIM within our peer group, which we've been able to do over a five-year period, over a ten-year period.
It's our expectation to do the same thing on a go-forward basis and to couple that with the growing loans that we see to just continue to drive the growth of dollars of net interest income, our spread revenue on a dollar basis. That's the goal. And everything we see continues to point to our ability to do that.
Got it. I guess maybe from spread revenue to fee revenue, you've been focused in terms of growing fee income growth as well. And I think some of the org structure might also lend itself to it. But just talk to us in terms of priorities, investment spend. And you've done a Capstone M&A. You've done some of that in organic acquisition.
Yeah, growth potential. We gave some guidance around fee revenue growth for 2023 at our earnings call a few weeks ago, and we talked about flat revenue growth.
And really what's going on there is two factors. On one hand, the strategic areas of focus that we have, capital markets, payments, wealth management, are doing exceptionally well. Those three areas would be on track to drive high single-digits overall fee growth for Huntington, so really performing very well. In 2023, we're clearly held back to some degree by four temporary factors: just the rollover on mortgage, which now appears to be actually running pretty well on a run-rate basis. But on a year-over-year basis, we'll have a rollover. Our continued evolution of our Fair Play product set and reducing deposit service charges. Again, we're at the run rate now, but year-on-year reduced. There's still the last vestiges of the TCF accounting impact of purchase accounting accretion and fees, a transition of our operating lease portfolio that also reduces costs by essentially the equal measure.
And then our decision to hold SBA loans on balance sheet as opposed to sell them, which is a great economic trade, drives revenue over the long term, but temporarily reduces fee revenues. Those are things that are keeping us flat overall. Coming back to the real growth drivers, in capital markets, we're seeing extremely good performance of penetrating the services into our base and just the performance of the team. In the core of our capital markets business, leaving Capstone, the recent acquisition aside, that business grew 25% plus revenue last year. So it's doing exceptionally well. And you bolt Capstone onto that. The middle market M&A advisory firm, which, notwithstanding some of the challenges in the M&A market broadly, continues to see really positive trends and is beating its own internal plans. We're really encouraged by what's happening there.
On payments, we continue to see great traction in treasury management. We've touched on that a number of times. And our card business as well continues to chug along. High single-digits growth in debit card, 20%+ growth in credit card, really strong performance. And then our wealth management business continues to perform really well and gather assets. So we like what we're seeing, and I think it's set up to see growth emerging. We think Q1 is typically a seasonal low point for fees. It'll probably be the lowest quarter, and we'll start to see growth thereafter throughout the course of 2023. And certainly, on a net basis, as we go into 2024, we'll start to really see the power of that strategy manifest even more clearly.
And are there more Capstones out there that you would like to acquire or just in terms of sizing of the business?
There are probably some complementary businesses that, whether it's Capstone-related or payments-related or other things that we might look at from time to time. Capstone itself is an extraordinarily talented team. We're very pleased. Even in a tough year, they exceeded expectations every quarter. They got a great pipeline. They're just now getting the benefit of the integration. These are longer sales cycles. They had very little penetration in the Midwest, where we have a really significant share. So as we introduce those relationships, that's 2024 and 2025 revenue that they're building. Things will probably pull back a little bit with change in yield curves and leverage ratios, etc., in the market generally. It just means they got to hustle harder. We have to, as we come together, help them do that to deliver this year.
But really like what we see there, there will be complementary businesses, smaller in nature, I think over time, whether it's payments or wealth or capital markets, these three areas of fee emphasis that we have.
And I guess maybe tied to that, just around capital priorities, you mentioned $1 billion buyback. At the same time, I think you're in the midpoint of your CET1 target. One, give us a sense of where you want to be in the current climate vis-à-vis the CET1 target, and how aggressive should we expect you to be in buybacks at some point during the year?
Well, as Zach said on the earnings call, with the volatility we're seeing right now and the uncertainties, we're going to continue to grow capital for the first half of the year.
But assuming we have clarity and we like what we're seeing in the second half and beyond, then we would look to execute the buyback at that portions of the buyback at that period of time. So we just have to be a little more patient, let this play out. We're generating a lot of capital. We're getting great balance sheet growth in addition, and that's driving revenue and PPNR growth. Like the position we're playing from, very strong credit reserves, one of the top in the regional bank space. And credit is not emerging as an issue, at least thus far in the quarter. And we don't expect it will this quarter. And we're very confident of our credit performance over time, as I said in the prepared remarks.
Well, we have two minutes. Just wanted to open it up and see if anyone in the room had a question for Steve or Zach. All right. If there are no questions, I'm going to continue. I guess I have two last questions. One, TCF. You talked about the synergies coming out of TCF. And from what I recall, they had undergone an M&A in close proximity to when they sold the bank to you. Give us a sense of that opportunity. I think $300 million in revenue synergies you had talked about.
Maybe I'll touch on that a little bit. Couldn't be more excited about the growth opportunities that come to us from TCF. We've talked about a run rate of value of $300 million annualized revenue by 2025. We generate $70 million of incremental revenue in 2022. So we are already generating it and on that path toward the $300 million.
It'll represent a 1% revenue lift for us over the next three years. That's quite sizable and significant for our business, so it's really attractive. I think about it breaks down to three big buckets. The first one, roughly a third, is in consumer, so to give you a sense, the acquired TCF branches were terrific, great locations, and it was a solidly run bank, but they were only about half as productive as a Huntington branch. Just we have a fuller product set, a stronger brand, and all the things that go into what we've been talking about all this morning, and so we've been systematically raising that performance profile of those branches. It's really generating quite a bit of performance. It's one of the reasons why consumer deposit gathering has been so strong in the fourth quarter and going into this year.
And that comes along with penetrating debit. So we're one of the best debit issuers in the country. We're number two on the Mastercard network, give you a sense of scale. And we have best-in-class penetration. And so it's just those basic blocking and tackling in the consumer business is going to generate about a third of that. Another third is commercial. So TCF had a great footprint, exposure to Chicago, the Twin Cities, Denver, big in Michigan, and had a commercial business that was largely at the smaller end of the middle market. And so Huntington, bringing our capabilities, going higher in the middle market, into the corporate space, adding resources into those geographies to really capture the commercial opportunity is another big one. We're already seeing that come through. We talked about some of the pipelines.
And then the last third is split between equipment finance, business banking, and wealth management. And all three of those are also doing pretty well to capture the opportunities that we see. So we've got a strong line of sight and confidence to get to those synergy numbers. I think, as I said, it's going to be a real tailwind for our growth for a number of years to come here.
And Ebrahim, we've got great new colleagues. We've bolstered and strengthened the company and the management team of the company as well, not to be diminished. So we delivered fully TCF. We're going to get the synergies now on the revenue side, strong start, expenses delivered. We like the positioning that the acquired company has given us in a number of these asset businesses, as we shared this morning.
And I think we're poised to really drive significant shareholder value, no matter what economic scenario comes before us. As I've said before, this is the strongest position in my 14 years at Huntington to play from as we go through 2023 and 2024 and beyond.
One last question, Steve. I think 10 years ago or so, you launched Fair Play Banking. And people didn't know what to make of it, whether you're going to be successful. You've been defining features, been tremendously successful. What should we look out for the next 10 years?
Stay posted. We'll be back to you later this year because we're working on it now, as we said at the Investor Day. And we've got some interesting concepts.
All right. I like the suspense. Thank you.