
Nick Stanutz counts Huntington Bank’s sixfold growth of its auto portfolio as one of the highlights of his 31-year career with the company. Stanutz, the bank’s senior executive vice president and managing director of auto finance, will retire at yearend.
Through September, Huntington had $11.9 billion of auto loans outstanding, up from $10.8 billion in the year prior period. Back in the late 1980s, though, Huntington’s auto portfolio was in the $2 billion range, Stantuz said. “We have successfully expanded the auto finance business going from a six-state footprint at Huntington, now to operating in 23 states, and we have been incredibly successful,” he said.
“We’ve been consistent with our dealers in terms of credit appetite, and we’ve been focused on creating a platform that was highly dealer centric,” he added. “The decisions we made always started with how it would benefit the dealers and how it would benefit the bank and our shareholders.”
Stanutz began his career at Indiana National Bank in 1978, and he joined Huntington in 1986 to help build the bank’s auto lending portfolio.
Stanutz’s position will not be replaced. Rather, each of his team’s leaders will report to different members of Huntington’s executive leadership team, starting Jan. 1, 2018. Rich Porrello, a 29-year Huntington veteran, will continue to manage the lender’s auto finance business.
Stanutz spoke with AFN about his impending retirement and his tenure at Huntington. Following are edited excerpts from the interview:
Auto Finance News: What’s your view on the current market?
Nick Stanutz: My view is that the indirect finance market, specifically, is very stable. I think credit is relatively benign at this point in the cycle. Clearly, there is a trend toward longer term loans that we continue to see. I don’t believe we will see loan terms [come down] anytime soon, and I think the underlying drivers are simply the fact that the new vehicles are becoming more and more expensive. Therefore, it’s pushing the price point of vehicles up, and 2017 is no different than the last five years. Used vehicles continue to hold value at a much higher level than any historical norm. The pressure of increased prices and lack of wage growth is putting a lot of pressure on affordability. As a result, you are seeing these extended terms that I don’t think will get better in the next several years; it has the potential to even get worse.
The challenge the industry has, and will have, is matching up the right customer — who has the right credit score and the right debt-to-income or payment-to-income ratio — to the vehicle that they want to purchase and therefore finance. The lenders who get that right will do extremely well, and those that put the wrong customer in the wrong term will see some challenges in terms of credit performance.
AFN: How has auto finance changed since your start in the industry?

NS: We clearly have seen a far more centralized approach by most lenders — the larger the lender, the higher the likelihood that they have a centralization of the business. We have maybe three centers and we are far more regionally focused in terms of geography. Clearly, automation has changed from when I came into this business, as 30 years ago applications were submitted over a fax machine and lenders then had to input the data manually. Today, Dealertrack and RouteOne have made the application process so much simpler for us. All the decisioning we did for a long time was all individualized; there was no artificial intelligence or auto-decisioning capability. The industry has advanced a long way.
AFN: To that end, what has not changed in the industry during your tenure?
NS: One thing that hasn’t happened yet is the whole e-contracting part of the business. There are certain captives requiring it to be done on new vehicles being processed and funded, but for the most part it’s a small percentage of the total number of lenders in the marketplace. I’m not sure in near term that I see a lot of that changing. Part of that is the behavior of the F&I department that there is no motivation for them to change, and we as human beings tend to be creatures of habit. I still see that as being problematic. The willingness and ability to change an old model that isn’t broken — from an F&I perspective — it may not get the adoption as fast as many would like to have it happen.
AFN: What are you most looking forward to in your retirement?
NS: Spending more time with my wife and kids. I’ve done a lot of traveling over my career which has pulled me away from spending as much time with them as I would like. And I have a number of hobbies, including cycling, golfing, and boating.
AFN: How will the structure of Huntington’s auto finance team change amid your departure?
NS: Rich Porrello has been with company and with me for almost 30 years in various roles, starting as sales rep and working his way up. He’s been running the business day to day, so really it will be business as usual. Porrello was tasked with additional responsibilities, such as the strategy of the business. Previously, he would have been more focused on the execution, and now the strategy of business is directly under his responsibility. We have hired some additional people on his team to help with day-to-day execution, so he won’t have as much focus on that. My retirement has been planned for a period of time, so it really will be business as usual for dealers and our colleagues