Investors underwrite management

When I underwrite a commercial real estate loan, the numbers are only half the file. The other half is the sponsor: have they done what they said they would, last time and the time before? A borrower with a strong rent roll and a habit of surprising the bank is a worse credit than the spreadsheet suggests.

Investors do the same thing to a bank's management team every quarter. The earnings release is the rent roll. The call is the sponsor meeting. Underneath every analyst question sits the one a credit officer always asks: will these people do what they say?

Bankers learn the five Cs of credit early. I've found they map almost one for one onto what a strong investor relations program has to prove.

Character

Credibility. Management does what it says, and says so early when it doesn't.

Capacity

Earnings power the Street can model, expressed in numbers rather than adjectives.

Capital

A framework published once, not a fresh negotiation every quarter.

Collateral

Disclosure deep enough for an analyst to check the story.

Conditions

The macro context, addressed before it's asked.

Character: keep score on yourself

In credit, character shows up in the track record. In investor relations it shows up in the say-do ratio: guidance given against guidance delivered.

Most banks publish a one-year outlook and revisit it each quarter. Far fewer show the scorecard. Of the bank investor relations sites I've reviewed, none publishes a simple targets-versus-actuals table: what we said, what we did, where we missed and why. It would be the most credible page on any IR site, because it's the table analysts already build for themselves.

Character also means owning a miss early. I trust the borrower who calls before the covenant breaks. Investors are no different.

Capacity: hand the Street a number to model

Analysts can't put adjectives in a model. The strongest earnings-day reactions I've studied came when management handed analysts a new, quantified lever: a deposit repricing program sized in dollars, or a profit-improvement plan with a dollar target and a timeline. Each became a line in the models and a question every quarter after. That's the goal: a story the Street tracks for you.

Medium-term targets do the same work at a larger scale. Huntington set an 18–19% return on tangible common equity target for 2027 at its February 2025 investor day. Bank of America published a 16–18% range in November 2025, and Wells Fargo repeats its 17–18% target on its calls. A dated target gives investors one number to hold management to, and it turns each quarter into progress against it.

Capital: publish the framework once

Capital questions come every quarter in slightly different words. Where is CET1 headed? Buybacks or growth? Does capital reform change the target? In the first half of 2026, Basel reform made "how much capital does this free up, and where does it go?" the standard capital question on regional bank calls.

The answer is a written framework, published once and updated when it changes: the target range and the reasons for it, the order of priorities (organic growth, the dividend, buybacks, acquisitions), and what would move the target. Then each quarter becomes an update against the framework instead of a new negotiation on the call.

Collateral: give them enough to check the story

Collateral is what stands behind the loan. In investor relations it's the disclosure that stands behind the narrative, and the gap between banks here is wide.

• Citizens posts its quarterly financial supplement as a native Excel file as well as a PDF. Many banks publish only PDFs, which analysts then retype.
• Huntington keeps quarterly results online back to 1994 and lists 17 firms on its analyst coverage page.
• Of every bank I checked, only JPMorgan posts its own written transcript of the earnings call. Everyone else leaves the record to third-party services, which routinely misspell analysts' names and occasionally mislabel the quarter.

None of this is expensive. A corrected transcript within 24 hours, a supplement in Excel, and a standing exhibit for whatever exposure the market is worried about this year are all within reach of a small team.

Conditions: address the macro before it addresses you

Every bank gets the same macro question in the same week. In the first quarter of 2025, tariffs and macro risk made up 18% of all analyst questions across the regional banks I studied. A year later they had all but disappeared from the calls. The answer that works is short, quantified and consistent with what peers are saying. A bank that sounds noticeably more worried than its peers can lag when the scare fades.

The practical step is simple: read the largest banks' calls before your own. They report first, and the themes on their calls reach regional banks within days.

Underwriting in reverse

A strong investor relations program is underwriting in reverse. Instead of testing someone else's story, you build your own so it survives testing: consistent, quantified, documented, and honest about the misses.

Sources

1. Huntington Bancshares, Investor Day presentation (8-K exhibit), Feb. 6, 2025
2. Bank of America, Investor Day materials, Nov. 2025
3. Citizens Financial Group, quarterly financial results
4. Huntington Bancshares, analyst coverage
5. JPMorgan Chase, investor relations
6. Author's review of 2,225 analyst questions on 119 earnings calls at 16 large regional banks, Q3 2024 to Q2 2026, from third-party transcripts