All right. We're excited to have KeyBank next up. I'll go through our disclosure. For important disclosure, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. The taking of photographs and use of recording devices is not allowed. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. With that out of the way, I'm delighted to have with us today Clark Khayat, Chief Financial Officer of KeyBank, and Ken Gavrity, President of Commercial Banking. Thanks so much for joining us.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Manan. Pleased to be here, obviously. For those of you that I haven't had a chance to meet, I lead Key's commercial banking business, which includes both our middle market segment, covering companies with annual revenue size from $10 million revenue all the way up to a billion dollars in revenue, as well as our commercial payments platform, which serves as a utility really across the business side of Key, serving customers all the way from our business bank, so think customers, a million dollars in revenue, all the way up to our corporate and institutional bank that covers the investment banking platform. Before I begin, I've been asked to read the following in the back of today's presentation, which you can find in the Investor Relations section of key.com's website.
You will find our statements on forward-looking disclosures, and these statements cover our presentation and related comments, as well as the question-and-answer segment from today's webcast. Statements speak only as of today, June 11, 2025. Okay, so I'm going to start on slide two with an overview of our commercial banking platform, which notably excludes our corporate investment bank run by my colleague Randy Paine. As the top left side of the slide shows, the commercial banking platform is a significant and growing portion of Key's total revenue. In 2024, it contributed $2 billion of revenue, which is a little less than a third of Key's total revenue during that period. The platform is also a significant source of liquidity and low-cost funding for Key, accounting for roughly 40% of Key's total deposits.
We have a strong foundation in the commercial bank centered around relationships and primacy, which you've heard us talk about for many years. In our middle market business, we have presence in 27 markets, which is broader than what you would see from us on the consumer side, and roughly 4,600 customers, about 95% of which have at least one non-lending product with Key. On the payment side, we have a scaled national business that touches over 8,000 commercial clients in all 50 states and a strong core deposit base, with 95% of deposits coming from customers with an operating account. Payments has also been a significant source of new customer acquisition for us, with about one-third of all new commercial clients coming to Key for our payments and deposit capabilities. Underpinning the strength of our business is our agile end-to-end operating model.
We house everything from the product teams, the digital teams, to onboarding and servicing of those customers all under one roof. This is different than our peers and ensures that the customer remains at the center of our strategy. It recognizes the importance in this business of the execution model, driving better product-market fit, more connected client journeys, and a better risk lens across the business. All in, the commercial banking platform is an efficient, high-return growth business for Key. You can see on the right-hand side of the slide in front of you, our middle market business has consistently generated 17%-20% return on equity, and our commercial payments business has grown revenue at two times the industry rate over the past five years.
Moving to slide three, there's a lot of interest in the middle market right now in the banking industry, but it's a unique space and one that we've been focused on for quite some time. We've intentionally and consistently invested in a platform tailored to meet the specific needs of a middle market client for decades. Back in 1998, we acquired McDonald Investments to build out our middle market investment banking practice and bring together both strategic advice and commercial balance sheet capabilities, and we were early to the game here. In 2014, more than a decade ago now, we saw the need to elevate our focus on financial operations for middle market companies. The growth in software and analytics aimed specifically at this space created very meaningful opportunities to add value for our customers. Over the next three years, we overhauled our payment strategy and our capabilities.
We roughly doubled our product teams. We established industry verticals with deep expertise around payments. We launched our fintech strategy, which was focused on workflow automation, the end-to-end part of the working capital cycle. More recently, in 2022, the growing interest in middle market by both banks, private capital, and software companies saw the proliferation of a number of products that were very specifically aimed at these customers, but it created a very fragmented client experience. We combined more than 10 separate departments across all of Key into a single integrated team focused on delivering the full platform through a seamless onboarding and servicing experience. This made it easy to do business with Key, where customer feedback could be immediately incorporated into customer journeys, think self-service needs, how we set up customers, how we did reporting, how we thought about delivering analytics back to the customer.
It allowed us to carry industry depth from the front-end business development model all the way to the back-end servicing model. Finally, in late 2023, we combined our middle market team with our commercial payments team to bring together the primary needs of this customer bank all underneath one organization. We integrated lending, payments, and deposit teams together with one set of priorities, a team-based approach, and fully aligned incentives across the team. It also created a single point of contact for the client, acting as a QB to deliver the entire platform. This is an important point of differentiation versus our peers. It allowed us to simplify the business, thinning out administrative layers across the organization and getting our best leaders closer to the customer.
This has been a really energizing move for our teams and continues to make this one of the most attractive models in the industry for talented bankers and payment advisors, which is incredibly important. Overall, it has been a multi-decade journey with a relentless focus on building competitive moats around this targeted client segment. I think we are really well positioned to scale this business. Middle market companies represented about 200,000 businesses across the U.S., a third of private sector GDP, an incredibly important and growing part of the overall economy. With this proven and differentiated model, we still have less than 5% penetration against this opportunity.
Moving to slide four, we have all of the products, or when you compare us to the industry, we have all the products that you would find at the large banks, but it is tailored to this targeted customer segment with more scale and breadth than the majority of our regional peers, including $7 trillion of payments volume, $61 billion of wealth assets under management, and raising more than $125 billion of capital on behalf of our clients. We also bring deep industry expertise across seven verticals that cover about 75%-80% of U.S. GDP, combining our local relationship model with industry depth across the capital markets and payments part of the platform. That drives more in-depth strategic conversation with the C-suite, with the decision-makers, and allows us to show up in a way that feels different to our customer base.
Ultimately, we deliver this through the differentiated servicing model that I already discussed, and it is why the average tenure of our middle market client base is more than 15 years, because middle market clients want a primary advisor. They want somebody that knows them. When you deliver, it is a very loyal customer base, and they want to bring you the full wallet share, and they want you in front of them regularly with strategic ideas and advice. You can see on the right-hand side of the slide with examples, whether it is the 60-year client relationship or a new customer on the bottom that we just recently onboarded, we have a meaningful opportunity to drive significant product penetration across this customer base. Turning to slide five. I mentioned earlier the catalyst more than a decade ago to build out our commercial payments business.
Since then, I've been at multiple investor days talking about our scaled national platform with clients in all 50 states. It's a robust set of capabilities that cover the very traditional products you would have seen from our peers like core treasury, liquidity, FX, and card services. It also includes the emerging capabilities such as embedded banking, automation, virtual ledgering, all of which are still at the very initial stages of industry adoption, and our early mover advantage positions us well here. The strength of our platform is about more than product capabilities. It's our industry expertise. It's our delivery model that puts the payments team next to the bankers and our ecosystem of partnerships we've built over a decade, including 15 fintech partnerships, seven VC relationships that are a critical part of our execution model.
This has been a real growth lever for us over the past decade, with annual revenue growth north of 10% over that time, cutting across the P&L in NII, deposit service charges, cards and payments income, and corporate services income. We believe that we have all the tools and capabilities that we need to continue to grow at the mid to high single-digit rate across a variety of macro environments. We believe that for a few reasons. First is that the industry as a whole has meaningful tailwinds behind it. Overall commercial spend is expected to increase north of GDP. There is a significant ongoing shift to digital payments, the paper-to-electronic theme we have heard plenty about, and our recent middle market survey showing that customers in this space, 80% of those businesses focused on finding operational efficiencies and looking to their bank to help provide point of view.
Second, despite meaningful progress, we still have significant penetration opportunities within our existing customer base, and you can see that on the right-hand side. We think top quartile performance is the right success metric for us given the strength of this business platform. Across each of our core product areas, you can see the growth opportunity as we continue to take ground against those benchmarks. Finally, the embedded banking opportunity continues to be exactly what we expected. Whether it's the exponential increase we already see in API usage by our existing clients or the aggregated spend and deposit availability by targeting existing customers in our technology vertical, the growth opportunity is real. We are at the scaling stage of this journey, and we are intently focused here. Okay, moving to slide six.
This shows the recent growth in middle market and payments and why we believe our strategy is working and why we continue to invest to drive outsized growth in this area. In the middle market over the last five years, our revenues are up about 25%. Deposits are up $4 billion, while the quality of those deposits has increased, with operating deposits now making up 88% of the total. A reminder, that number is just for middle market. For total commercial segment end-to-end, that number is still 80%. Finally, we grew clients by 8% and expect some lift in that metric moving forward as we shift more of our focus to adding core customers to this platform. In payments, you can see the sustained double-digit growth across NII and fees in a business that we love that drives core liquidity and sticky, recurring, high-value income streams.
As you look to move forward here on the next slide, our strategy remains the same. We're going to add more bankers to the platform. We're going to continue our focus on primacy clients. As always, we're going to continue to elevate our risk management capabilities. Unpacking those a little bit on the banker side, we are on track to increase our banker count by 10% this year, and we're targeting select geographies based on market attractiveness and our ability to win in the market. We're also targeting more team hiring, leveraging the recent success we had with expansion into both Southern California and Chicago. Those teams, which we hired at the end of 2024, have already driven significant new customer growth, loan volumes, and payments business.
Our holistic platform is very attractive to bankers that want to be able to monetize delivering a full set of solutions to the client. We like the pipeline of talent that we already have set up. Second, as we maintain our primacy focus, we're going to continue to invest across our product platforms and driving efficiency and scalability in our model, the ongoing focus of our data foundation, what we've been focused on for many years now, and scaling our embedded banking strategy. Finally, on the risk and analytics infrastructure, we continue to elevate our risk expertise in strategic areas to drive growth. Examples of that include industry-specific expertise, deeper levels of product expertise, and more focus on the defensive and offensive opportunities that we see in private capital.
Lots of opportunity to continue to differentiate here, mitigate risk, and ensure we have the right risk-reward optimization across the portfolio. In closing, our commercial bank model delivers real, tangible value to our customers and strong, sustainable returns for our shareholders. Our strategy has been consistent, put in place over many years, and is very hard to replicate. Our priorities are very clear across the business, positioning us for outperformance and a meaningful opportunity to scale. With that, turn it back to Manan.
Thanks so much, Ken. Lots of detail there and lots for us to dig into. Maybe we will start with the environment overall. Ken, when you think about client sentiment currently, what are you hearing from different clients in different geographies and different industries, as well as different sizes by client type?
Yeah.
I don't know that there's a lot of differentiation across industry and size at this point. What I would tell you is if we contextualize that question a little bit, if you go back to 2020 and 2021, this middle market segment in particular had a lot of stress on it. You obviously had a tremendous amount of inflation being put into the system. You had supply chains that were not only shocked, but it was an existential change to some degree, right? It was we had to find new suppliers very quickly. You added on top of that one of the most dramatic rate increases in history. We all know these facts, but when you think about it for a middle market customer or a client over a very short period of time, those were significant stresses.
What it did was it allowed those companies and those management teams to truly understand their supply chain in a very different way than they ever had in the past. It showed the nimbleness and adaptability of that customer base. When you then fast forward to, say, 2022 through 2024, over three years, this middle market segment, $10 million in revenue to $1 billion in revenue, they've had 10% annualized revenue growth during that period of time. You had a shock, you had the adaptability, and then you saw very successful top-line growth. Some of it certainly with the pass-through of inflation, but it also showed their ability to be able to do that. When you look at margins, operating margins for that business, you saw really nice return to profitability over the last couple of years.
With that as the context, I think that's really important to understand where we are today. When you then think about really the broader macro concern that we all have on tariffs, you now have a middle market segment that has shown they can move incredibly quickly to respond to marketplace shocks. You have a group that now understands their supply chain way better than they would have if they had not gone through the pandemic. When you think about that as the backdrop, you actually have a still cautiously optimistic customer base right now. Leading into this year, it would have been all growth-oriented. What I would say at this point in time is we do not hear any customers pulling back from that mindset.
It's much more of a focus on, "Give me a better sense of where economic, broader economic health is, and then I'll put my foot on the pedal and accelerate a little bit more investment." We would have had a middle market sentiment survey just released, I think it was yesterday, or maybe it was even this morning, where we were constantly taking the pulse of this part of the market. This is part of the differentiator. We just know this space. North of 90%, I think it was 91% of the respondents said a top priority is managing the tariffs. Not surprising, but when you see it that ubiquitous, what it tells you is what might have been oriented toward growth was around just making sure that the business was ready to adapt.
I think that was taking a big piece of the mind share. The other really interesting part of that was half of them also said, "This is a growth opportunity." They see the disruption in the marketplace to figure out, "Okay, which one of my competitors are not going to move as fast, or where will the big guys potentially be hurt? And is this an opportunity for me to take market share?" Long answer, but I wanted to just provide a little bit of context and context.
That's perfect. It feels like they feel confident in their ability to pass on at least some of the cost to the consumer.
What you would see in their answer very specifically is the top three areas are what you would expect.
They're going to take some portion of it and be able to push it on to the customer. Historically, that would have been a lot more over the last couple of years. They're less confident they can push all of it through. You see in their answers that, "I'm going to push some to the customer. I'm going to push some to my vendors, to my suppliers." There's some portion of that they're going to be able to, through efficiency, they believe that they can help offset. That goes back to once you understand your supply chains, you know where the levers are.
Got it. Clark, anything else you'd call out from a large corporate or consumer perspective on the tariff front?
I think Ken hit it right, which is broadly our businesses and clients came into this period, I think, in pretty good footing.
I think they've been cautious, as probably everyone has been, and we saw that kind of play through April. Activity's starting to build back again. I think there's a relatively small amount of our commercial clients that we're watching very closely, just given some of the dynamics. I think broadly cautious optimism is the right statement. You do see people who are even a little bit more aggressive starting to lean in and take advantage of what they think are dislocation opportunities.
You were doing a name-by-name review as well. Is there anything you learned in any specific industries there?
Not so much. I mean, the way I would think about that is we looked at 850 names or so, $10 million of exposure or greater. A relatively small percentage had kind of direct impact from tariffs.
An even smaller percentage had that in combination with maybe some weak financial performance. Those are the ones we're really watching closely. At the end of the day, the "direct tariff impact" is relatively contained. The issue really is if tariffs do come in as originally planned, that's a bigger macroeconomic condition. That obviously impacts broader groups. We are just, to Ken's point, trying to understand at the client level what position are they in and how are they handling this. It is a very manageable number at this point.
Got it.
Maybe just one other execution point that I would put there because I think this is important.
If you would have gone back three, four years ago, the lower end of the book, so our middle market clients on Downtown Business Bank, we would have looked at more at the aggregate level and done analytics on what we see in the portfolio. I think what we've done in our investment over time, as I continue to highlight there, our elevation of risk management is we've brought the model that we have in our corporate and institutional bank of portfolio management down into the middle market. We are highly focused name by name. We understand the quarterly financials that come in at a level of depth where we have a better forward-looking view, let's see, of the risk that's bubbling in the book. Or, I'm sorry, the risk that could be bubbling in the book.
Right. Got it. Maybe pivoting over to loan growth.
Ken, Key has been an outlier so far this year in terms of C&I growth, about $1.5 billion in C&I growth in the first quarter. I think Chris noted that you guys have already done that so far this quarter as well. How much of that growth is attributable to your middle market business?
Yeah. I would say on the middle market side, we saw similar growth as what we saw on the corporate and institutional side. So we would have said in the first quarter, C&I growth was about 2%-3%. That's what we saw in the middle market as well. And consistent with what Chris has said, we continue to see really nice growth so far in the second quarter.
Some of that is also contextual in the sense that if you go back to 2023, like a lot of banks, we were repositioning the balance sheet. We looked across the middle market portfolio like we did everywhere else. We figured out where do we have relationships that are lending only, or there is not a relationship, or we do not have the right connectivity to the top of the house. Those were places that we used to shrink the balance sheet while we continued to focus on our primacy customers. It is really in the second half of 2024 that we started to lean into growth again. Obviously, the balance sheet and liquidity are in a really good place.
As we take this model on the road, we feel really good about competing with others in the marketplace, whether that's the trillionaires or any of the local banks that we compete against. We always feel good about our ability to take share. I would say that's part of it. The only other thing I would point to is I would have announced, as I said in the presentation, that in the fourth quarter of 2024, I picked up teams in Chicago and Southern California, two of the largest five clusters of middle market companies in the country. As we start thinking more and more about this team hire model, it's a really attractive platform for bankers, as I said, because you're really delivering a holistic offering. We incent bankers to deliver the whole bank.
It sounds fairly straightforward, but the reality is that isn't the case at all of our peers. It's part of a scorecard for not directly rewarded or for some of our regional peers and smaller. They just don't have the holistic set of capabilities. Your most talented teams look at this as an opportunity to say, "Okay, I get to deliver that whole product platform to the customer. I get paid for it. That's really interesting to me." We expect to continue to see growth from areas where we're expanding.
It sounds like a lot of this is core growth as opposed to maybe your clients being a little bit nimble on the inventory side. Is that driving?
There was a little bit of utilization pickup in the first quarter. We saw some in March trying to get ahead of April's liberation day.
We saw it come right back down. I think overall across the platform, we've seen a little bit of a tick up in utilization, but nothing that I link directly to the current environment that we're in. I've seen that stabilize and normalize.
How do you think about competition overall? We've heard some banks talk a little bit about price and competition. Some banks talk about competition for new customers. What are you seeing in your client base?
There's no question that at every client pitch, there are more banks hanging around the hoop at this point in time. I think all banks have gotten much more interested in loan growth again. That said, I haven't seen that pull all the way through to price and competition. It's held in really well so far.
Forward-looking, with this much interest in loan growth, could we see a little bit more pressure there? Absolutely. To date, again, we think the strength of the value proposition has allowed us to keep pricing, keep it whole.
Clark, given this momentum in loan growth, I think you have previously guided to flat end-of-period loan growth for the year. Are you considering adjusting that forecast?
I think at this point, we are trending above on C&I. We had expected about maybe $3 billion or so for the year. We are kind of there now. Some of your questions we are trying to sort through, how permanent is that? Although a good chunk of that comes from project finance deals, whether it is affordable, renewable, data centers that we did late 2024 that are drawing down as expected. Some are from our specialty finance business, right?
It's clearly not tariff-oriented, would be my point in each of those. Remember though that that end-of-period was sort of runoff versus consumer or build versus a runoff and consumer, which is not happening at exactly the pace we expected because of rates. Then prepayment and CRE, we had a lot in the first quarter, not as much in the second quarter. I think we're trending to a little bit higher than we expected. I will take all high-quality C&I growth that we can get. We'd like the consumer to peel off again, just given the rate differential. We'll continue to look at this through the quarter, and we'll have a point of view at the end of Q2 because there's just still, I think, enough uncertainty that it's hard to call.
Anything to update us on the broader full-year guide?
At this point, we feel really good about where we are. We would not change any of the guide for the full year at this point.
All right. Perfect. On that full-year guide, on the NII guide specifically, you have had that out there since, I think, the fall of last year. It has not changed even though the macro expectations and rates have moved around a lot. I guess what gives you the conviction in that growth rate as we get through this year?
Yeah. Your first point is a good one, which is things have been moving all over the place. Plus or minus, we could have been changing it dynamically. Or more than usual. Probably been up in the same place. The confidence really comes from the structural nature of it, right?
The chunk of it is from the two repositionings we did in the portfolio last year. There is the investment benefit from the Scotia dollars. There is the full-year impact of Treasuries and swaps having rolled off. There are the reinvestment rates, which have been up and down, but on par, kind of in a range. All of those are math. That math is pretty close to 20. We have been able to speak, I think, with a lot of conviction there. It also does not say it is likely to be 25 or 30. I mean, it does give us a little bit of a window. Really, the delta is what is happening in the loan book and what is happening on the deposit side.
Got it. What about on the fees front? Is there anything to call out in terms of capital markets or the wealth business?
Yeah.
I'd reiterate Chris's point recently that capital markets are up about 10% first half to first half. I view that as on par for our guidance for the year. Slow April, just given what was going on, but a nice recovery in May, and we see continued activity and engagement. At this point, we feel good about that. I would say fees broadly, most categories. We said five-plus. We feel good about that. Maybe a little tighter to five, just given the kind of stall out in April and obviously sensitive to the second half. If you look at the main categories: payments, wealth, investment banking, commercial servicing, those are all performing very well, like mid to high single digits, some of those low teens. You offset that with operating lease expense, which sort of brings that down, right?
Net-net, you're in that range and sort of progressing as expected. We feel very good about that. The counter expenses, which we've said kind of 3%-5%, we would go in most cases probably maybe even 3%-4%. As there is pressure on fees, if there is pressure on fees, we feel like we can bring that down, and we'll be able to produce the fee-based operating leverage we've talked about.
Perfect. All right. That's great. Let's dig in a little bit on fees. Ken, on the commercial payment side, just about every super regional bank has highlighted this as an area of one of their biggest growth opportunities. You spoke in the presentation about having a single point of contact, making sure getting the full relationship. Can you talk about what Key's value proposition is here?
Yeah. Absolutely.
I'll cut it into two pieces. I'll cut it into how we go to market in the middle market and then more broadly across the rest of the commercial payments platform because those are a little bit different. On the middle market side, when we talk about this platform, what we say to our customer base is that we're large enough to have every capability that you need, small enough to be able to deliver it through a singular team. That's not just a good tagline. It's the practical reality of how you go to market. If you compare that to JPMorgan or a BofA, certainly they have every capability set that we have on the payment side.
The reality of how to make that feel small to a $200 million revenue company that does not have a really big finance team when they have a Chase payment tech team. They have a card team. They have a core treasury team, right? It is very difficult to deliver all of that to a CFO and make it feel very manageable. When we come in, and in the middle market, a lot of times payments follows lending. If we come in and say, "Hey, we are willing to extend the balance sheet here," our expectation is that we are going to get the payments business as part of that.
Now, a lot of the other regional peers would say, "Yep, no, we do the same thing too." It comes to, "But how do you deliver the rest of the platform?" They might be able to get the core treasury. When you look at, let's say, our merchant capability where we were very early to the game, it was 2017 when we unwound the joint venture that we had with one of the processors. That was a very consistent model across the merchant landscape where it was really joint ventures, and the banks just threw a customer over the fence and said, "Hey, we think there's an opportunity. Throw it to their sales team. Throw it to their servicing model, their onboarding and servicing team." We unwound that joint venture. We have the product team, the onboarding team, the whole servicing model in-house.
When we go in and payments follows that lending, we expect to get the core treasury. We expect to get the merchant. We expect to get the card. We built the apparatus around that and the operating rhythms and the operating rigor around making sure that we're getting holistic payments attachment when we bring on a middle market customer. When you then pull that up to the corporate.
Right. Maybe add one thing there because a lot of those payment products are volume-based. If the client's not using them, you do not get paid. The client does not see value. We do not see value, right?
One of the other things that a lot of the good companies do, and Ken's built this now going on 10 years, is these client success and optimization teams that make sure the client understands when to use it, how to use it, and that they are actually getting volume through the pipe because then there's benefit to the client if the value proposition is a good one. That's how we see value. You will see it's not, "Hey, I made a loan and you get the money today." It's, "You agreed to do this. We have to install and implement some technology." Then there's a ramp-up period.
That's part of why you see certain categories of growth at low teens, our fee equivalent revenue, which is that kind of price times volume, right, continues to be strong because some of it is a new client, some of it is a new product, and some of it is just continued optimization on the existing portfolio.
You naturally get the deposit as well, which is fairly sticky.
Correct. Yeah. Absolutely.
As I would have said in the presentation, the average customer, 15 years, right? You see that go as high. We have a big chunk of the customer base that's 20-50 years. Just the last piece that I would just want to add before we leave that, which is, as you get up into the corporate and institutional side, some of this is just a function of how Key was structured.
The fact that we were very early to the game in putting our bankers in industry verticals, we now have payment teams that are fully lined up against every single one of those verticals. Unlike other regionals, I have a real estate payments team, a healthcare payments team, an oil and gas payments team, a power and utilities payments team. That brings a different level of expertise, and that's how you win out market versus the middle market.
All right. Perfect. I wanted to pivot over to private credit. Key has been front and center in partnering with the private credit space. There's clearly been a lot of competition there. Can you talk a little bit more about your decision on where to compete versus partner there?
Yeah. I'll start on what I see, and Clark can give the broader view.
Look, I think what's really important, I'll cut this into two pieces, what we see near-term versus what we see long-term. In the near term, I don't run into private capital very often. So the deals that those groups typically are looking for, they're not looking to do a revolver for a customer. They want a term loan. They want something that's funded immediately. They generally want something that's higher return. So they're much higher out on the leverage side than we are. So the deals that they're winning in the marketplace is generally a deal that I've already passed on or I'm not interested in bidding on. Longer term, clearly there's a lot of capital amassed in this space.
Part of what we're doing and what you had mentioned in your question is we do a lot of strategic work with the private equity group, private capital providers already. We're looking to push into those relationships and say, "As you're finding these deals and getting deal flow, how do I help you provide a singular solution around payments and deposits, that same customer base?" I think there are opportunities around that for sure.
Yeah. I think if you just think about how we've operated in that market, which we've been part of for a long time given our distribution capabilities, we will put obviously client loans on the balance sheet. We also lend to our specialty finance business is lending to finance companies who are generally warehouse lenders. That's a phenomenal business for us.
It is since 2006, not a dollar of loss, very efficient regulatory capital structures. If you go up a tier, it is that kind of relationship with Blackstone where we are kind of sharing some of those balance sheet items. You go to our own direct lending funds. We have a partner fund where we have a little bit of equity, but we are the senior lender to basically a direct lender that Ken and Randy can use to compete. Lastly, we obviously distribute a lot of paper. We feel very well situated to operate in that private credit world or with them, in most cases cooperating. As Ken said, as they start to become, or if they become a more competitive threat in the core middle market, we will adapt to that, and we think we are probably better positioned to do that.
All right. Perfect.
I want to end with one question for you, Ken, on investment spend, and then Clark on capital. Ken, on the expense side, how are you thinking about the investment spend needed for the broader growth opportunities in your business?
Yeah. I'd just point to the slide that's still up and say growing bankers on the front end of this platform is incredibly important. If you look specifically at the middle market, we haven't necessarily been as disciplined in adding to that over time. Obviously, a lot of macro events would play into that. We're going to be on target to grow 10% this year on the front end. We're going to continue to focus on our team hiring strategy, which could plus or minus some opportunity on that number.
As you look across the other two areas, just the constant investment in our payments platform, there is no set-it-and-forget-it type of strategy there. You have to layer in across these platforms year in, year out. I have nothing new I need to add.
Perfect. Clark, you have a $1 billion buyback authorization, and you have spoken about starting buybacks back half of this year. Any thoughts on the pace of buybacks just given the volatility that we have seen in the tenure so far?
Yeah. I think volatility in the tenure is consistent with uncertainty in the market, right? Some of this is we are happy to have the "excess capital" at the moment given uncertainty.
The way I would think about it, which hopefully is the way we've talked about it consistently, is we really will use that on the margin to manage the capital ratio. And the capital ratio we're going to be focused on is Mark Capital. If we're kind of 9 and a half to 10 now, that's not a bad kind of zip code to think about. We're going to be making money each quarter, right, assuming not a significant macro event. We would start to use it again assuming it's not way out of line, right? The high-class problem of my stock price is too high. We will use it on the margin to manage that Mark Capital ratio.
Got it. Perfect. With that, we're out of time. Thanks so much, Clark and Ken, for joining us.
Thank you.
Thanks for having us.