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Huntington Bank is on track to complete its Carolinas expansion in three years rather than the five identified initially, its CFO said.
The Columbus, Ohio-based regional said last September it was expanding in North and South Carolina, planning to open 55 branches in five years across six metro areas: Charlotte, Raleigh and Winston-Salem in North Carolina, and Charleston, Columbia and Greenville in South Carolina.
Huntington CFO Zach Wasserman said Thursday the bank has 37 of those 55 branches under letter of intent for real estate development, putting it “well ahead of schedule.”
The lender initially announced commercial expansions into North and South Carolina and Texas in late 2023 and early 2024. The bank, which has almost 970 branches in 13 states, has commercial customers in every U.S. state, but “what we weren’t doing was servicing the local middle market,” Wasserman said in an interview.
Expansions in the Carolinas and Texas were focused on building teams to cater to middle-market companies, offering deposit taking and lending, but also payments, capital markets and treasury management services. That approach is a relatively low-cost way to launch and build the brand in a new market, and the bank achieved profitability in those markets in less than a year, Wasserman said.
What it’s now pursuing in the Carolinas is what it considers a second phase: building out a physical branch infrastructure, lining up the organizational resources to offer its full consumer product set, and putting big marketing dollars behind it all.
“Building out the entirety of the Huntington banking franchise is a more significant investment,” including “hundreds of millions of dollars” in marketing, hiring and added capabilities, he said.
Wasserman declined to provide a more specific dollar figure for the Carolinas and Texas expansions. He said it’s “quite significant,” although absorbable within the bank’s overall expenses and capital guidance. Huntington has said non-interest expenses are expected to grow 3.5% to 4.5% this year, from about $4.5 billion in 2024.
The bank said in September that it expects to add about 350 employees across business lines through the Carolinas expansion. Wasserman said the bank is on the path of hiring “dozens of people” and expects Huntington will take on “hundreds more colleagues.” Huntington currently has about 20,100 employees.
The bank spends a good deal of time considering growth markets that hold promise, both within its existing footprint and adjacent territories, Wasserman said. It’s almost a “postal code by postal code-level analysis” that examines migration trends and where economic growth and business formation are occurring, he said.