Good morning. I'm Manan Gosalia, the large-cap and mid-cap banks analyst here at Morgan Stanley. On behalf of the entire Morgan Stanley financials team, I would like to welcome you all to the 17th Annual Morgan Stanley Financials Conference. We've got a great lineup today. We have a record 136 companies in attendance. Kicking off our conference, I'm delighted to have with us today, Zach Wasserman, Huntington's Chief Financial Officer, Brant Standridge, President of Consumer and Regional Banking at Huntington. Zach and Brant, thanks so much for joining us. Manan, thank you so much for having us. All right. Perfect. Brant, let's get right to it. We're seeing a strong jobs market out there, resilient consumer on the one hand. On the other hand, we have higher energy prices, stickier inflation. Maybe set the stage. What are you seeing out there in the environment? From a macro environment, we're seeing something similar to what you described, in that the overall outlook is positive. We're not seeing any deterioration from a credit perspective. Our pipelines are still strong. Behavior from both a commercial and consumer perspective seems very rational. Sentiment from our customers is also positive, both business customers and consumer customers. Specifically, our business customers have become very resilient in dealing with tariffs and supply chain disruptions and so seem to be doing quite well. One area that you called out that we are clearly watching is the impact that rising energy prices and food prices have on, ultimately, the consumer. Middle income and lower income consumers are specifically hit more by that impact than others. So we are specifically watching that. Today, we're not seeing really any signs of major deterioration. We believe based on our posture and risk appetite, that we're in a fantastic position as we go forward. Got it. All right. Perfect. Things are going well. You're specifically watching out for a few risks, but you're not seeing anything there. Maybe let's bring it to Huntington specifically. Huntington has consistently outgrown peers across loans, across fees, deposits. You've done that for several years in a row now. I guess what differentiates your model that enables you to consistently drive this growth? I guess the second part of the question is, how sustainable is it from here? Well, I'll start. First of all, it starts by bringing and providing to our customers across both consumer and business an exceptional experience. We've been fortunately recognized in J.D. Power for consumer as being one of the top one, two, or three for the last number of years of the top 20 banks in the country from a satisfaction perspective. We've been fortunate that Greenwich has recognized us this past year with over 15 awards including Best Bank for overall satisfaction. It starts with an exceptional customer experience. We're very focused on having deep relationships with our customers. That is supported and augmented by the fact that we've added a lot of expertise and capability over the last number of years, we bring that to our customers in a highly integrated fashion and make it simple for them. Our local teams are challenged to build deep relationships locally, we integrate the expertise of our national teams with those local organizations and local teams. Lastly, as it relates to our customers, we want to build trust. We want to have relationships that are ground. One of the things that we've been very focused on for many years is being consistent for our customers and putting the company in a position that they can count on us regardless of the cycle that we may be at. If I just tack onto that just to share that how our operating model is also differentiated. The way we think about it is we want to create a model that will generate high and strong levels of total shareholder return but also allow us to continue to invest to be competitively, not only surviving, but thriving in the industry over time. The way we do that is to couple high single-digit to low double-digit revenue growth with a continual re-engineering of our baseline operating costs. In the last six years, we've taken out 1.3% per year of our operating expenses. This year, in fact, 2026 will be the seventh consecutive year of doing that. Those things together then fuel the ability to drive significant investment back into the business. When I say investment, I mean technology development, marketing, the ability to build the branch channel, the ability to add people to the organization to build out business lines, new geographies. Collectively, that pool of investments now represents 9 percentage points of revenue, much more plowback than any other large regional bank which supports that large and high level of sustainable revenue growth. It's been a 20% CAGR in investments for seven years in a row. Ultimately the outcome of that is last year is a great emblematic picture of that. It was 11% revenue growth, 16% earnings growth, 19% book value per share growth, all at a 16.5% return on capital. We think that model is incredibly differentiated, and the fact that we have been able to continue it for, this will now be the seventh year in a row, demonstrates the sustainability of it. Are there any differences in, I guess what's been driving the growth over the last seven to eight years versus what's driving the organic growth today? It's a very consistent model. Ultimately, we think about the legs of the stool for us to drive growth. We've got our core business. When I say core, I mean the business lines we've been operating for a number of years in our core Midwest footprint for those businesses that really operate geographically, consumer and our smaller end of middle market, and then our large corporate business, which is national and key specialty lines. That is growing equal to or even faster than the average in the industry. On top of that then, you've also got a number of new growth initiatives that we have powered with that investment capacity that I just mentioned earlier. Last couple years, we've launched into new states, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. We've built eight new commercial specialty verticals; all of these business lines are very still growing and have not reached maturity. Last year, those really represented two legs of the stool. 50% of the growth came from the core, 50% from the new initiatives. That's what powered 10% year-on-year loan growth last year. As we think going forward, there's another powerful leg of the stool, which is really the opportunity to drive significant organic growth within the Cadence and Veritex footprints and customer bases. We've talked about a $500 million revenue synergy over the next three years, of which $50 million-$75 million is this year. That will represent about a 1% lift in overall revenue growth in a sustainable basis. We think there's multiple growth engines and quite a bit of sustainable long-term opportunity there. Let's talk about that integration. You put out your slide deck last night. The Veritex integration is completed. Cadence is on track. Can you give us more of an update on how these integrations are going and where you stand on some of the key execution metrics, like customer and banker retention? First of all, they're going quite well. You mentioned Veritex, we were able to do that in really record time. We've completely converted Veritex. We have achieved the cost synergies that we outlined for Veritex, we are in the early stages but very encouraged by what we're seeing from a revenue synergy perspective. Obviously, Veritex was very focused in Dallas. We have a top five share there, we have excellent momentum. We've been able to attract additional bankers to what is now a significant platform in the market. We're very pleased with where we are. As it relates to Cadence, we were able to close at the beginning of February. We intend and will convert in two weeks, there's been no real major surprises there. We've been very pleased with how the work leading up to the conversion processes has gone. We've had multiple mock conversions. We feel very positive about the experience that we're going to create for our customers. We have had numerous levels of reach out and communication to those customers to make sure that that transition is positive as it can be. We're pleased with what we're seeing. We've been very fortunate that we've been able to retain key talent. In fact, we offered at the beginning approximately 1,000 colleagues that were in significant revenue-generating roles retention programs, we've had less than 10 of those that have left since announcement. That level of retention of key talent has actually exceeded our expectations. We are on track and have very clear line of sight to the cost synergies associated with Cadence, we will deliver those. You'll see those in the fourth quarter. We also have a very clear sight into the revenue synergies. The most substantial of those revenue synergies is what we do with deposit business, specifically the rationalization of pricing and also the massive digital opportunity that exists in the Cadence footprint. We launched digital in April in the Cadence footprint, and what we're seeing thus far gives us a lot of optimism about the future. There's a number of businesses where we're already seeing very strong momentum. Capital markets working with the Cadence commercial teams, now Huntington commercial teams. We're seeing that in our dealer business. We're seeing really strong uptake with our more sophisticated treasury and cash management platform. Merchant has been a real tailwind for us. We feel very positive about how the conversion is going. The retention of both customers and colleagues has exceeded our expectations. As Zach alluded to earlier, it's a fantastic platform and springboard for us to continue to grow. Last comment I would make on it is, now that we have a sizable platform in a number of really key markets, we've been able to add talent on top of the talent that we are partnering with. We've added teams in Austin, San Antonio. We just hired a leader in Nashville. We're adding bankers in Atlanta and have hired a team there. This creates a fantastic platform for us to grow, and we're very pleased with where we are right now. Right. Perfect. High retention and you're hiring new teams from outside the bank. Maybe bring this to the numbers here. I think you mentioned, Zach, you just mentioned about $500 million of revenue synergies. There's about $435 million, I believe, in expense synergies from the combined acquisitions. Can you just round that out with those numbers? Sure. I'll start on the cost side, Brant can touch on the revenue side. As was alluded to a second ago, a complete line of sight to deliver on the cost synergies, $70 million from Veritex. That was delivered fully in this quarter that we're in right now, Q2. $365 million from Cadence. We're on track for that as well. All the decisions and actions needed to execute that are underway. Once we get through the conversion, we'll be able to fully deliver those actions, and we'll see that full run rate in the fourth quarter. By the fourth quarter, $435 million of cumulative cost synergies. That's going to be very powerful to drive earnings power and return. It'll move efficiency from the roughly 58% level last year down to the low to mid 54% level by Q4 of this year. We expect that to further decline to approximately 53% by next year. That's a primary driver of the 200 basis points of increase in return on capital. Of course, there's really exciting revenue synergies that my partner can elaborate on. Yeah. We have identified $500 million in revenue synergies over the next three years. We'll realize $50 million-$75 million of that in this year, then in next year, more than $100 million. We're very much on track. I mentioned a few of the big opportunities that we have that are right in front of us, including the big opportunity that we have in digital. In fact, just to share one statistic related to that, we opened up Huntington online account opening or digital account opening in the Cadence footprint in April. If you compare our productivity in April to the digital production of Cadence, it's 10x. That's without really any significant marketing dollars yet into the market, and that's also without having converted and displaying the Huntington brand in the market. We're really pleased with where we are. That's one example. We also see a number of examples across the commercial bank, specifically in capital markets, the wealth opportunity and really bringing wealth resources across the Cadence footprint is a very large opportunity. Payments. This now creates a big opportunity with a large customer base to bring our payments capabilities in both treasury and merchant and card and other areas to that customer base, and we're already seeing very strong uptake. You're already seeing a lot of synergies on the revenue side, and there's a lot more to come once the conversions are done. That's right. The conversion, certainly getting everyone on one platform certainly unlocks a lot of potential, and we're able to move forward. In order to really drive the deposit opportunity, we needed to get past the conversion- Right which we will. The early signs are positive. A number of the synergies related to our wealth business or payments business. We're seeing traction from the outreach that we've had, but we need to get on the same system in order to start really realizing that. The conversion in a couple of weeks really opens up the opportunity in a significant way. Right. Perfect. Let's bring this to the present moment here. What are you seeing across your core customers today in terms of activity, demand, overall momentum? I think back at earnings, you moved your loan growth guide from maybe the high end to the midpoint. As you see some of these trends, how did that inform your decision to guide this 2026 growth to the midpoint rather than the high end of the range? Yeah. Maybe I could start with where we're seeing growth, and Zach could add to the guidance and the numbers. One, our commercial business and regional banking business is seeing strong growth, and that's continuing. We are obviously seeing from the eight new specialty verticals and the specialty verticals a substantial amount of growth. Those businesses are really in the early stages of their maturity. They have a lot of growth opportunity related to that. We're seeing really positive momentum in all of the businesses. When you look at our expansion into North and South Carolina and also the increased platform we now have in Texas, all of those present really strong growth for us. Clearly, as it relates to Cadence, we knew that there would be some remixing or optimization that we would do that was determined in due diligence. We knew exactly what we were going to do, and the actions that we've taken and that we talked about have very much been in line with that thought process going in. If I just expand on that and bring it back to guidance a little bit. As Brant was talking about earlier, the environment overall is setting up very favorably. Frankly, if you ask me today, sitting in June, how are we seeing the world? It's more favorable than when we were sitting in April providing guidance. With that being said, what we're seeing on the ground is very much supportive of achieving all of the financial targets that we've given already. We're seeing, as we noted, very strong pipelines. Customer demand looks quite strong. Customer behaviors, all told, look very normal, and pricing and the macro environment looks very rational and predictable. All that's setting up very well for us to continue to achieve the goals that we've set. All right. I'm going to double-click into deposit costs in just a second. Maybe before that, you also revised the fee growth guide up at earnings. How should we think about fee growth from here? You have strong verticals in payments, wealth, capital markets. How sustainable is that strength as we go forward? We feel that it's very sustainable, and we have been consistently investing in the three businesses specifically that you just mentioned. All three of those are growing double digits. We are really pleased with momentum that we're seeing in our capital markets business, and the acquisition that we made there at the end of last year is really proving to be helpful. You saw that in the first quarter, and we feel very strong about our momentum. We've made a couple of major announcements in our wealth business as it relates to investment. We're investing in our broker-dealer platform, and we're also making a significant investment in upgrading our trust platform. We will continue to invest in very strong growth in the wealth business. As it relates to our payments business, it is an area of significant focus. Our partnerships offer opportunity for us to bring payments to a whole new customer base. We're continuing to innovate and add new capabilities like merchant a little over one year ago and additional payments and treasury capabilities for our customers. We feel very strong about our ability to grow fees overall, but specifically in those businesses, we see those continuing to grow at the rate they've been growing. If I just bring that back to the operating model points I made before. The objective around value-added services is twofold. One is drive capital-light revenue streams that are very profitable. Secondly, of course, strategically further wrap our arms around our customers and develop even stronger primacy and a broader breadth of services for our customers. Ultimately to see the percentage of the revenue base of the company that is fees grow. Today we're approximately 28% of the revenue pool is fees, and I would expect that to approach 30% as we go throughout the course of the remainder of this decade. That's with fees sustainably growing faster than the balance sheet, faster than spread revenue. That's even as NIMs continue to expand. Really, if you think about it, as Brant said, it's these three core power alleys that are really driving that. In the last three years, payments, wealth management, capital markets collectively have grown revenue at 11%. That's very consistent over time, really driven by fundamentally penetrating the opportunity and as Brant said, both investing organically and in certain cases inorganically to support that. The other side of it is the spread revenue. Zach, maybe if you can help us connect the deposit cost back to the updated guidance. I think at earnings you spoke about NIM going to the high 3.20s. Help us connect what you're seeing on the deposit cost side with what you're seeing on the spread revenue. Continue to see the same picture for NIM that we described in April. Fundamentally seeing us exit this year in the high 3.20s and continue to expand into next year. Two primary drivers for that. One is fixed asset repricing, and we continue to benefit from that. In fact, just based on the way the long end of the yield curve has moved over the last several months, it's even a larger benefit than had been the case before and more sustainable out into 2027 as well. The second thing is really optimizing Cadence deposit costs, and Brant alluded to that earlier. There's really kind of two big categories of that. One is a shorter-term opportunity that we'll execute into the third quarter after we get through conversion, which is really optimizing certain higher cost buckets of both core and wholesale funding. There's a longer-term opportunity that we'll execute over the course of the remainder of this year and into next year in a deliberate way around deposit beta and acquisition pricing. I will say on top of that, there will likely be another benefit, which is if the environment generally stays stable, which it is, there'll be an opportunity for us to reduce the elevated levels of liquidity that we put onto the balance sheet in the second quarter to be ready to be opportunistically seizing opportunities. Thankfully the world is pretty stable and that doesn't look necessary. That will provide some additional uplift for NIM over the course of the next couple of years. All that kind of brings it back together to say rising into the end of this year, rising into the end of next year. Likely NIM in the second quarter and third quarter will be variable plus or minus a few basis points as we go throughout that optimization. All of this sort of sets up to continue to support the net interest income guidance that we've given. Anything to say on the competitive aspect of deposits? Increasingly we're hearing banks talk about certain geographies getting more competitive. What are you seeing across the different geographies? Are there any markets that you're choosing to emphasize or de-emphasize here? Well, it is competitive. There's obviously more asset growth in the industry, and as a result of that, more need for deposits. For sure that is the case. We've been quite successful in competing in markets like the Midwest that are very competitive successfully. We believe going forward, we can do the exact same thing in the Midwest and the new markets that we serve. A couple data points I would mention to you. I mean, first of all, our focus for deposit generation is on generating new checking customers. We've been very fortunate that we've been able to generate in the first quarter 4% consumer checking household growth, 7% regional banking checking household growth, and 6% commercial checking household growth. When you have a base of your customers growing, that certainly supports the deposit growth of the company, not just today, but over the long term. We also look at our markets across the footprint, and we have that divided into 56 distinct pricing regions. We look at competition in each of those regions. As we're attracting new balances, we're optimizing across markets based on what we see the competitive environment being in an individual market. We believe Texas is a big opportunity for us. If we just look at pricing competitively in Texas versus the Midwest and parts of the South, it is not the most competitive market we're in. In fact, the Midwest is priced more aggressively than Texas. The interesting thing about our position in Texas is that we're entering with significant scale. We'll have more than $26 billion in deposits in the state, a top five share in Dallas and a top five share in Houston. That's significantly more scale than most of our regional bank competitors entering the market. I would also mention that in our core Midwest footprint, as you know, there's some disruption taking place. That creates opportunity for us, and we're seeing significant deposit growth as a result. We're very optimistic on the guidance that Zach just described and believe that even though the market is competitive for sure, that we can continue to compete as we have from a deposit perspective. All right. Perfect. Maybe another question for both of you on the deposit side. There's a thesis out there that stablecoin and AI-based technology will disrupt banking in various ways. One of that is around deposit flows. How are you thinking about the risk posed by stablecoin, and what do you think they'll mean for your depositors? Yeah, maybe I'll start on that one. Firstly, in terms of digital assets and stablecoin, we think it's a very exciting opportunity, and one that will present great opportunities for the banking industry to innovate new products and services. With that being said, it's also clearly very early days, and so we'll have to see where it goes. Fundamentally, if you ask yourself the question, why would you anticipate a digital asset-related financial services product to proliferate? Three primary reasons. One, it's very efficient, and so presumably the pricing will be attractive. Secondly, it's real time, and for certain use cases, that's quite a valuable feature. Lastly, it's programmable. It's very digitally native. If I was going to be innovating, for example, a new agentic payments capability that leveraged AI tools, I might very well think about doing that on a blockchain rail to take advantage of the smart contract nature of it. I do think that if you start to tick down the list of what are some interesting value propositions that add value for customers, most of the time, those don't actually need a coin to be part of them. It's really just leveraging tokenized money movement, tokenized deposits. I do think that I'm very encouraged by the fact that several industry consortiums within banking are now coming together to set standards for tokenized deposit money movement, and that will now label a new bastion of innovation. We ourselves at Huntington have announced we're part of three of these consortiums, leaning in quickly, building the infrastructure to make sure we're ready to address client needs. Any thoughts on what that might mean for deposit costs down the line across the banking system? I think there's been a lot of hypotheses around what could happen with stablecoins. Are they a competitive threat? Would AI-based deposit sorting represent a threat? In my mind, those are a bit overblown and certainly well ahead of themselves in reality. I think to some degree, the way I think about it is it comes down to these will represent at the margin money market-like yield opportunities likely for customers. But the core low-cost funding base of great companies like Huntington worth it is incredibly granular. Our average checking account is around $10,000 in size. It's not very relevant to conceive of overly optimized outcomes there. My sense is this will be at the margin. Importantly as well, as I noted, it's an exciting technology. Over time, the banks have always shown the ability to innovate and leverage these technologies and ultimately find ways to generate returns. I'm pretty sanguine about it. It'll just represent another instance of needing to lean in and adopt new technologies and ensure that we can meet customer demands. Manan, if I could add to that. As Zach described, the area where we're really focused is being in a position where the advantages from a money movement perspective that this technology brings to customers, that we're able to bring to customers. If we're able to bring the capabilities of the efficiency and speed of that money movement, then their relationship stays intact. The other comment I would make is as you think about a relationship that an individual has with a financial institution like Huntington, it's about more than just the deposit. It's about the advice that they received. It's about other services. It's about access to other capabilities. That is core to what we do and how we engage customers, and we believe creates a level of distinction. Great. We just focused on AI and the impact on deposits. Maybe zooming out a little bit, how are you approaching AI across the organization today? Where are you seeing the most meaningful areas of focus and momentum there? Significant focus. I think we've come to the topic of AI with a fundamental belief that this is one of the most transformational technologies that we've seen enter the world in a long time, maybe ever. Ultimately, AI will touch almost every element of society, every element of commercial activity, and certainly every element of banking. We're leaning in very aggressively here. Importantly, we are seeing the continued, almost exponential growth of the power of the models. We were in Silicon Valley meeting a lot of the big hyperscalers last year. We went again just about a month ago, and it was really quite dramatic to see the developments. That exponential curve is not stopping, and so we want to continue to lean in really heavily. For us, four big focus areas. One is agentic process transformation. I talked earlier about our systematic approach to re-engineer the baseline cost of the company and take out between 1% and 1.5% of the cost base each year. This year, about a third of that program will be driven by agentic process transformation. My expectation is that next year that will double as a percent, and the year after be virtually the totality of the program going forward. Big focus on driving that. The second, though, and frankly more exciting, is around new product development and customer-facing tools leveraging AI. I think this is earlier days but getting a larger share of the mind within the company, because that really is critical to be able to ensure that our products are leveraging this so we can add customer value there. The third, and a really important one, is around elevating the skill set and providing tooling to all of our colleagues. There's a significant effort underway for training and providing tooling out to drive productivity much more broadly and elevated customer servicing. Lastly is around data. I feel incredibly fortunate that we have invested significantly in the data infrastructure for the company for a long time, and therefore the data quality is extraordinarily good within Huntington. What the focus is now is putting context around that data so it can be even more powerfully used with AI across the entire enterprise. A lot of momentum and expect to see significant growing benefits. If I could just add two things. One, we view AI as an opportunity to take a lot of friction out of the customer experience. In everything that we do, we try to put the customer at the center and design around the customer. This will give us an opportunity to take a lot of friction out. The second is the speed of innovation, especially as it relates to using AI to drive the creation of new products and software development. The ability to determine a need for a customer and then deliver that need, AI really brings a completely different level of speed. Got it. I guess, where are you seeing the measurable impact on the P&L from AI? As we think about the financial contribution and some material financial contribution there, I guess, how long is the timeframe to that? Yeah. As I noted just a minute ago, seeing a growing share of agentic process transformation driving efficiencies within the base. There's several big areas that are in focus. The software development life cycle. We're spending approximately $550 million this year on technology development, developing new tech. Clearly, as you can get efficiencies in that's a pretty scalable area to drive savings. The second is in operational processes broadly across the company. Third, risk management of functions like BSA, AML are a growing focus, and I think will contribute meaningfully over time. It's really almost every kind of main process within the company is going to be ultimately touched and re-engineered with AI. What is, as I noted, more exciting frankly is the revenue lift that we expect to get from it over time. That's something that we'll expect to see generated over the coming years. All right. Perfect. Maybe Zach, bringing this all together, the deck yesterday spoke about the $1.90- $1.93 2027 EPS guide. Help us understand how these pieces contribute to that, and how confident are you in that target at this point? Sure. We continue to be very confident in the delivery of the financials this year and the guidance we've given this year, and the $1.90 - $1.93 earnings per share next year, and the 18%-19% return on capital, which is a 2% increase in return on tangible common equity as we go into next year. Frankly, as we noted kind of at the earlier part of the session, we think you're going to see much of that in the fourth quarter. The fourth quarter is going to be a very significant delivery of all the major efficiencies and a scaling contribution of the revenue synergies that you'll see effectively that run rate earnings coming through from the fourth quarter. What are the ingredients? It's $435 million of run rate cost synergies. It's meaningful and growing revenue synergies. It's the organic business that continues to drive high single to low double-digit revenue growth and double-digit earnings growth. We get a lot of questions of; can you walk and chew gum at the same time? Can you continue that organic growth while also integrating partners? Can you continue to be as successful in the future as you have? The answer is yes, and we're delivering it. Q4 was excellent. Q1 was incredibly strong quarter. This quarter, Q2, is going to be another example of that. I think what we're heads down is focused on delivering those results and have every confidence we're going to do it. You've laid out some very significant targets for 2027, earnings growth, ROCE. The stock has underperformed the peer group over the last few months. I guess, I get a lot of questions on it, but maybe to get your take on it, what do you think explains that share price performance, and what do you think. Sure needs to happen to see that change? Look, I'll tell you, management and the board of Huntington is a top 10 shareholder, so we feel this very viscerally and are very frustrated by it. With that being said, the questions that I get from investors are primarily threefold. As I mentioned just a second ago, can you continue your organic success while also integrating partners? The answer, full stop, is yes. We're delivering that. The second is, you've set forth some pretty ambitious targets. How likely is it that you'll actually achieve them? The answer is we have multiple levers to get to those performance levels, and we have every confidence in achieving them, just as I mentioned. The last is, would you do further M&A? The reality is, as responsible fiduciaries, we can never foreclose that opportunity. There could be something that comes up. With that being said, it's not our focus. We're focused on organic growth. We always said that partnerships are in service of creating long-term organic growth opportunities. The opportunity now that we're presented with a leading share in Texas, one of the fastest-growing and most vibrant economies in the country, a strong presence in great markets throughout the South, another million and a half customers to which we can focus on deepening customer relationships. There's a tremendous organic growth opportunity in front of us, and we have every intention of driving that. All right. With that, we're out of time. Brant, Zach, thanks so much for joining us.