Huntington Bancshares Incorporated (NASDAQ:HBAN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Zach Wasserman: Yes. They were a very powerful benefit. I think it’s — they’re protected, as you know, about 1/3 a whole would have otherwise been AOCI Mark reduction, which was their primary attention originally, but also have played out in terms of really strong reported yields in the securities portfolio. Roughly half of the approximately 50 bps increase in securities yield was from that hedging program to give you a sense of the scale of it. And I think where it goes from here in terms of incremental benefit is going to be, to some degree, a function of just where that mid-portion of the curve goes and at this point, it’s fairly well topped out. I’m not expecting a ton more lift there. The lift from that has reduced somewhat from the third quarter, but it still is very accretive we’re not adding to that portfolio now. And so I think we’re getting the benefit that we expected from it.

Ken Usdin : Okay. Great. And then one follow-up on deposit beta. 17% total cumulative so far through the cycle. Can you just remind us what you’re thinking about betas from here and just to be super clear for us, if you don’t mind, on I think you guys usually do talk on total?

Zach Wasserman: Yes, sure. So it was 17%, to give sense is kind of tracking across time, it was 6% in Q2, 11% Q3, 17% in Q4. So continues to track and kind of in the additional 5 to 6% to 7% range each quarter. And the expectation is to go out into Q1, it can be sort of more of the same, continuing out over until we get into the middle part of the year. Our planning assumption Ken, is something on the order of 35% total through the cycle, which would indicate we’re about halfway through to the prior point that I made. With nothing that I’ll tell you where we’re intently focused is on the day-to-day management and really very, very rigorous looking client by client in the commercial portfolio, geography by geography in the in the consumer portfolio and ensuring that we can stay competitive and ensure we’ve got a strong deposit franchise.

And so we’ll continue to wait and see and manage against that. If the outlook changes will let you know. But at this point, it continues to track according to that broad expectation.

Operator: Our next question is from the line of Erika Najarian with UBS.

Erika Najarian: You mentioned on Slide 18 that you expect to be at the low end of your net charge-off range. The tone very quickly changed this week from some land into hard landing. I guess my question here is this may be obvious to us that have covered the company for a while, but what makes you confident despite the deteriorating economic outlook that you could stay at the low end of that already pretty low range and given some of — there was a — I wouldn’t call them up here, but there was a company that reported pretty eye-popping delinquency numbers in auto this morning. I’m wondering if you could give us what’s going on with auto credit trends underneath. And again, we remind us why you feel confident about how that portfolio would perform in an economic downturn.