Huntington's Fair Play Banking: How a Regional Bank Built a Customer Experience Brand

TL;DR#

Huntington National Bank built one of the clearest banking customer experience brands in the US by turning its fee policy into a promise, starting with 24-Hour Grace in 2010. Under the "Fair Play banking" banner, the Columbus, Ohio regional bank gave customers until the end of the next business day to fix an overdraft before a fee hit, then added a no-fee $50 Safety Zone in September 2020 and a digital line of credit called Standby Cash in June 2021. Huntington expected the original 2010 changes to cost about $24 million in fee revenue in the following year, according to American Banker. In 2022 it cut its overdraft fee from $36 to $15, a move estimated at roughly $14 million per quarter, and CEO Stephen Steinour said the bank would "make that back" through new customers and lower attrition. Huntington now reports $225 billion in assets and more than 1,000 branches in 14 states. The lesson for other regional banks is not "copy the fee schedule." It is: find the moments customers experience as unfair, listen to them in their own words, and redesign the policy before a regulator or a competitor does it for you.

Huntington National Bank at a glance#

Huntington National Bank is a Columbus, Ohio based regional bank, founded in 1866, that has grown into one of the largest regional banks in the country. Its parent, Huntington Bancshares, describes itself as a "$225 billion asset regional bank holding company" with "more than 1,000 branches in 14 states" in its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings release. That same release notes the completed Veritex integration in January 2026, part of a southern expansion that has pushed Huntington well beyond its Midwestern footprint.

The growth is striking when you compare it with where the bank stood when it expanded its overdraft protections in 2020. Its September 2020 press release described Huntington as a $118 billion bank with 839 branches across seven Midwestern states. In roughly five years, assets nearly doubled.

Huntington also has a long record in third-party satisfaction rankings. The bank reports that it received the highest score in the North Central region of the J.D. Power U.S. Retail Banking Satisfaction Study in 2013 through 2017, 2021, and 2023, and ranked No. 1 in Pennsylvania in the J.D. Power 2024 study. For a regional bank competing against megabanks with far larger marketing budgets, that recognition is a core part of the brand.

Fair Play banking: Huntington 24-Hour Grace, the $50 Safety Zone, and Standby Cash#

Fair Play banking is Huntington's umbrella for a set of fee and account policies designed to remove the "gotcha" moments from everyday checking. The bank calls it a "contrarian approach to business that was driven by doing the right thing for customers," introduced after the Great Recession. Three features carry most of the weight.

How does Huntington 24-Hour Grace work?#

Huntington 24-Hour Grace automatically waives an overdraft fee if the customer makes a deposit during the next business day that resolves the overdraft. It launched for consumer accounts in September 2010. When American Banker covered the launch, Mary W. Navarro, then Huntington's director of retail and business banking, described the customer sentiment behind it in plain terms: customers were effectively saying, "Give me a little time I'll make the deposit." In September 2020, Huntington extended 24-Hour Grace to business customers, making it available on consumer, business, and commercial checking, savings, and money market products.

That origin story matters. 24-Hour Grace was not a pricing experiment dreamed up in a finance meeting. It was a direct response to what customers said about the moment an overdraft happened: they were not trying to borrow money, they were a day early on a purchase or a day late on a paycheck.

What is the $50 Safety Zone?#

The $50 Safety Zone means Huntington charges no overdraft fee when an account is overdrawn by $50 or less. The bank introduced it in September 2020, raising the prior threshold from $5, and positioned it as help for customers navigating the pandemic recession. Combined with 24-Hour Grace, customers get two layers of protection: a small cushion that never triggers a fee, and a one-day window to fix anything larger. Steinour framed the tradeoff directly in the announcement: "While we are again forgoing some fee income with 24-Hour Grace for Business and a no overdraft fee $50 Safety Zone, doing the right thing is also good business."

What is Huntington Standby Cash?#

Standby Cash is a digital-only line of credit that gives eligible Huntington customers instant access to up to $1,000 for unexpected expenses. According to Huntington's June 2021 launch release, there is no interest or fee for customers who sign up for automatic payments; otherwise a 1% monthly interest charge (12% APR) applies. Eligibility is based mainly on how customers manage their checking account rather than on their credit report.

Standby Cash closes the loop on the overdraft problem. 24-Hour Grace and the Safety Zone reduce the penalty for a shortfall. Standby Cash gives the customer a way to avoid the shortfall in the first place, on terms that feel fair.

Why overdraft fees became a banking customer experience problem#

Overdraft fees became a banking customer experience problem because they hit customers at their most financially stressed moment and are experienced as a penalty, not a service. A $36 fee on a $4 coffee purchase that overdrew an account by a few dollars is the kind of moment customers remember and repeat to friends. It rarely shows up as a clean signal in a quarterly relationship survey, but it drives switching, complaints, and lost trust.

The scale is large. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) reported that overdraft and non-sufficient funds (NSF) revenue at large banks totaled about $5.8 billion in 2023, down more than $6.1 billion from pre-pandemic levels, according to its April 2024 data spotlight. The CFPB estimated the decline saved the average household that overdrafts about $185 per year. The same report noted that by late 2023 most banks were no longer significantly reducing fees.

Regulation then swung both ways. The CFPB finalized a rule in December 2024 that would have capped overdraft fees at $5 (or a cost-based alternative) for institutions with more than $10 billion in assets. Congress repealed it under the Congressional Review Act, and the resolution was signed into law on May 9, 2025. For regional banks, that means fee policy is once again a competitive choice rather than a compliance mandate.

This is exactly where Huntington's early move looks smart. The bank made its overdraft decisions in 2010 and 2020, long before the 2022 to 2024 regulatory push, and it did so as a brand choice. When the rule disappeared, Huntington's customer promise did not. Customer experience in banking is increasingly decided in these small, emotional moments: the overdraft, the declined card, the hold on a deposit, the surprise maintenance fee. Our look at customer experience management in banking and the hand-off problem covers how many of those moments fall between teams and never reach a dashboard.

What Fair Play cost and what it won for bank customer retention#

Fair Play cost Huntington real fee revenue, and the bank has been unusually open about that. The public numbers tell a consistent story:

1. 2010: Huntington expected 24-Hour Grace and related fee reductions to reduce revenue by about $24 million in the following year, on top of a separate $52 million expected decline from new regulations on overdraft and interchange fees, per American Banker.
2. 2020: Steinour acknowledged the bank was "again forgoing some fee income" with the $50 Safety Zone and business 24-Hour Grace.
3. 2022: Huntington announced it would cut its overdraft and NSF fee from $36 to $15 starting in July. Banking Dive reported that the change was expected to cost about $14 million per quarter and that Huntington earned $138.5 million from consumer deposit service charges between July 2020 and June 2021, about 2.7% of operating revenue.

What did it win? Huntington has not published a clean attribution of customer growth to Fair Play, so any precise return figure would be speculation. What the bank has said publicly is how it thinks about the trade. On the 2022 fee cut, Steinour said, "over a few years, we'll make that back," pointing to new customers, lower attrition, and more business. That is a bank customer retention thesis stated out loud by a CEO: give up fee income today to keep and win relationships over years.

The outside evidence is directionally consistent with that thesis. Huntington collected repeated J.D. Power regional satisfaction wins in the years after Fair Play launched, and it grew from $118 billion to $225 billion in assets between 2020 and late 2025 (through a mix of organic growth and acquisitions, so the growth cannot be attributed to fee policy alone). The durable win is brand clarity. "24-Hour Grace" is a named, trademarked promise that customers can understand in one sentence, which is rare in a category known for fine print.

For CX leaders, the more useful point is that the retention math only works if you know which fees customers experience as unfair. Cutting every fee is expensive and does not create a brand. Cutting the one fee that customers talk about, and naming the promise, does. Our guide to what customer retention is and the signal surveys miss goes deeper on why these signals rarely surface in scores.

What regional banks can learn from Huntington#

Regional banks can learn that a fee policy is a customer experience decision, and that the best version of it starts with listening to customers at the moment it hurts. Huntington's advantage was not a bigger budget than the megabanks. It was a willingness to act on what customers were saying and to package the answer as a named promise. The same logic runs through our analysis of what regional banks can win in financial services customer experience that megabanks can't. Here is a practical framework for building that listening layer yourself.

Step 1: Map your "unfair moments"#

Start by listing every moment where a customer pays a penalty, waits without explanation, or gets surprised: overdraft and NSF events, deposit holds, maintenance fees, card declines, paper statement charges, early account closure fees. These are the moments with the highest emotional weight and the lowest coverage in a traditional relationship survey. Pull complaint logs and call reasons to rank them by volume.

Step 2: Ask customers why, right after the moment#

Legacy survey platforms send a score request days later, and a 0 to 10 rating cannot tell you whether a customer was annoyed, embarrassed, or already opening an account elsewhere. An AI interviewer can reach out within hours of a fee event and ask open questions: what happened, what they expected, whether it changed how they feel about the bank. Perspective AI runs these conversations by text or voice, with voice interviews in 57 languages, automatic language detection, and accent-native voices, so a customer can simply talk through the moment. The Fee Change Research template is built for exactly this: testing how customers react to a fee, a fee change, or a new protection before and after you roll it out.

This is also where transactional measurement helps. If you already run event-triggered scores, our same-batch guide to transactional NPS in banking explains which moments to trigger on, and a conversation layered on top captures the why behind the number.

Step 3: Listen to the customers who are about to leave#

A fee event is often the first step in switching. Interview customers who reduce balances, move direct deposit, or close accounts, and ask what triggered it. The Bank Switching Research template structures these conversations so you can separate fee-driven attrition from rate shopping, service failures, or life events. Pair it with customer churn survey questions that surface why customers really leave for the question design.

Step 4: Turn what you hear into a named promise#

Huntington's most transferable move is naming. "24-Hour Grace" and the "$50 Safety Zone" turn policy into something a customer can repeat. Once conversations show which unfair moment matters most, design a fix and give it a name customers will remember. Then use a broader bank customer experience survey template in conversational form to check whether the promise is landing across branch and digital channels.

Step 5: Route findings to the people who own the policy#

Insight that stays in a research deck does not change fee policy. Perspective extracts structured fields (fee type, sentiment, switching intent, requested fix) from every conversation and routes them to owners through Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, or email automations. Teams can also query the conversations directly from Claude and other AI assistants through the Perspective MCP server. Our piece on closing the voice of customer loop from insight to action covers the operating model.

The banks that do this well tend to hear their digital-first customers too, who rarely visit a branch and never fill out a lobby survey. See digital banking customer experience and hearing the customer who never visits a branch for that channel, and banking customer experience with conversational feedback for branch and digital for a broader program design. Credit unions face the same dynamics; our breakdowns of Navy Federal's member experience and credit union member experience competing with fintech on CX show how member-owned institutions approach it. For the wider picture across lending, wealth, and deposits, see Perspective's banking industry page.

Frequently Asked Questions#

What is Huntington 24-Hour Grace?#

Huntington 24-Hour Grace is an overdraft policy that automatically waives the overdraft fee if a customer deposits enough money during the next business day to resolve the overdraft. Huntington National Bank introduced it for consumers in 2010 as part of its Fair Play banking approach and extended it to business customers in September 2020. It applies to checking, savings, and money market products.

How does the Huntington $50 Safety Zone work?#

The Huntington $50 Safety Zone means no overdraft fee is charged when an account is overdrawn by $50 or less. Huntington raised the threshold from $5 to $50 in September 2020. Combined with 24-Hour Grace, customers avoid a fee if they bring the account to no more than $50 overdrawn by the end of the next business day.

Did Huntington lose money by cutting overdraft fees?#

Huntington gave up meaningful fee revenue, by its own public estimates. The bank expected about $24 million less fee revenue in the year after launching 24-Hour Grace in 2010, and its 2022 cut from $36 to $15 was estimated to cost about $14 million per quarter. CEO Stephen Steinour argued the bank would make that back through new customers and lower attrition.

Why do overdraft fees matter for bank customer retention?#

Overdraft fees matter for bank customer retention because they hit customers at a stressful moment and are experienced as a penalty, which makes them a common trigger for switching banks. A single unexpected fee can outweigh years of good service in a customer's memory. Banks that listen to customers right after fee events can spot switching intent before the account closes.

What can regional banks learn from Huntington's Fair Play banking?#

Regional banks can learn that fee policy is a customer experience decision and that naming a customer-friendly policy turns it into a brand. Huntington acted on customer feedback years before regulators focused on overdraft fees. Other banks can replicate the process by identifying unfair moments, interviewing customers right after them, and redesigning the policies customers talk about most.

Is banking customer experience measured by surveys enough?#

Survey-based measurement is not enough on its own because scores show what happened without explaining why. A relationship survey might show satisfaction dipped, but it rarely reveals which fee or hold caused it. Conversational AI interviews triggered after specific moments capture the reasoning, the emotion, and the switching intent that CX and product teams need to act.

Conclusion: building a banking customer experience brand like Huntington#

Huntington's Fair Play banking shows that a regional bank can build a banking customer experience brand out of the least glamorous part of the product: fees. It started with customers asking for a little time to make a deposit, turned that into 24-Hour Grace in 2010, added the $50 Safety Zone and Standby Cash, and cut its overdraft fee to $15 in 2022, all while accepting the revenue cost in public. The regulatory pressure on overdraft fees has come and gone since then. The brand promise stayed.

The part any regional bank can copy is the listening. Find the moments customers experience as unfair, ask them why in their own words right after it happens, and route what you hear to the people who own the policy. Perspective AI gives CX teams an AI interviewer that runs those conversations at scale by text or voice and delivers structured findings to the right owners. Try the Fee Change Research template to hear how your customers react to your fee policy before you change it, or see how Perspective works for CX teams.