As head of asset liability management for U.S. Bank, part of Hannah Honeycutt's job is to challenge the bank's business line leaders. They want to deploy the bank's capital for loans; she wants to make sure the capital is allocated to the right kind of loans.
"What we're really working with the business to understand is: When we create that loan, are we getting a return that's worth our capital?" said Honeycutt, a senior vice president and balance sheet management executive for the bank.
"When I see it from a capital standpoint, I have a tendency to think, 'That's just a use of capital.' When the business line sees it, they're like: 'If I give this commercial client a line of credit, that's the lifeblood to that commercial client and so they're going to want to talk with us about their treasury management relationship, about their corporate card, about their deposits.' Banking is very successful when we can have a very deep relationship with our clients," she said.
U.S. Bank has had a lot of "single-service loans" on its balance sheet, so for the past few years it has focused on building interconnected loans where clients have multiple service relationships with the bank, Honeycutt said. "That's just a better use of the company's balance sheet because we have more capacity for returns. We're going to get more revenue when we have an interconnected client."
Part of Honeycutt's job is to provide balance sheet appetite and pricing guidance for all loans and deposits, which totaled $382 billion and $513 billion, respectively, at the end of the first quarter of 2025. Last year, she took on the job of building a dashboard for U.S. Bank's corporate, commercial and corporate real estate businesses, which had about $150 billion in loans and $150 billion in deposits in the first quarter.
The dashboard is intended to provide formalized, consistent, detailed information to the business line managers about how their strategies or tweaks to those strategies will impact the overall return for the bank, Honeycutt said.
"Treasury does not want to make all the decisions for the business lines. What we want to do is help the business lines have the right information — talk to them about the trade-offs and then let the business lines make the trade-offs," she said. "They're closer to the client; they're going to have better insights than we are."
Presenting the information in a standardized, highly visible form makes it more likely that the business lines will incorporate it into their strategies, Honeycutt said. "We can create all the dashboards, KPIs, reports, pick your word, we can create that all day long. The real question is: Does the business understand it, do they believe it and do they use it?"
As she prepares for potential leadership positions, Honeycutt said that mental practice reps can be valuable — a lesson she learned playing sports in high school. She describes herself as "five-foot-two and very slow," so she was used to doing mental reps on the bench.
"We don't get a lot of opportunities in banking to just practice on things, but if there's a question, a situation, we can take a quick pause and say: 'How would I have answered that if that question came to me?' Or, 'What would I do in this situation?' and try to make sure that you're pushing yourself to continue to think about: How would I solve this?" Honeycutt said. "As you get the bigger opportunity, yes, you don't have the live repetition or the live practice. But you've thought about it and you're at least comfortable in how your approach is going to be."
