Huntington Bancshares

Huntington Bancshares

Huntington Bancshares was founded in 1866 as P.W. Huntington & Company and has grown through a string of disciplined acquisitions into the largest bank headquartered in Ohio. Chairman and CEO Stephen Steinour has led the Columbus-based institution since 2009, steering it through the post-crisis consolidation wave that reshaped Midwest banking. The bank operates a commercial asset management and trust division that invests on behalf of institutional and high-net-worth clients, though it does not break out AUM figures as a standalone discretionary manager would. The bank's investment posture is inseparable from its $125B+ loan book, which skews heavily toward commercial and industrial lending across Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois. Asset classes embedded in the portfolio include middle-market corporate credit, equipment finance, commercial real estate, and asset-based lending—all deployed through the bank's regional footprint rather than a fund structure. Huntington's wealth management arm, Huntington Private Bank, serves family offices and business owners with direct-indexed portfolios, private credit allocations, and trust services, often recycling operating-company liquidity into multi-generational planning vehicles. Huntington has grown its professional headcount through M&A, most notably the 2021 merger with TCF Financial, which added a Detroit presence and roughly $50B in assets. In June 2024, the bank closed the acquisition of a $9 billion specialty finance portfolio from CapStar Financial Holdings, deepening its middle-market lending capacity in the Southeast (per the firm, June 2024). The combined platform now fields over 20,000 employees, though dedicated investment professionals within the wealth and asset management division are not publicly enumerated. Adjacent vehicles include the Huntington Foundation, which directs philanthropic capital into economic-development grants across the bank's footprint. Huntington's structural differentiator is its hybrid nature—a publicly traded regional bank that functions as a de facto private credit shop for owner-operated businesses in the industrial Midwest. Unlike a fund manager that must raise and deploy committed capital on a fixed timeline, Huntington uses its deposit base to offer revolving credit lines, equipment loans, and sponsor-backed acquisition finance with permanent-capital flexibility. That balance-sheet model gives it a sourcing advantage with family-held manufacturers and distributors that independent asset managers cannot replicate.