Huntington Bank Joins CHIPS® for High-Value Payments

WHY THIS MATTERS

The announcement on May 19, 2026, that The Huntington National Bank has joined the CHIPS® (Clearing House Interbank Payments System) network marks a major strategic upgrade to the lender’s enterprise transaction banking capabilities. Operated by The Clearing House, CHIPS is the largest private-sector U.S. dollar clearing and settlement infrastructure in the world, moving more than $2 trillion daily.

Historically, large regional banks have managed high-value domestic and international wire transfers through the Federal Reserve’s Fedwire Funds Service. While Fedwire offers instantaneous Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS), it is capital-intensive because it requires full, gross funding for every transaction. CHIPS, conversely, acts as a massive liquidity savings engine. By using a patented multilateral netting algorithm that continuously matches and offsets counterparty positions throughout the day, CHIPS achieves an extraordinary liquidity efficiency ratio of 26:1. In practice, this means every $1 of funding Huntington commits to the network supports $26 in settled payment value. For Huntington, this drastically minimizes the idle regulatory capital tied up in daytime payment queues, allowing the bank to redeploy billions in freed-up liquidity into high-yield commercial lending, investments, and customer financing.

The Huntington National Bank has joined the CHIPS® network, the largest private-sector U.S. dollar clearing and settlement system in the world, to clear and settle high-value domestic payments.

Huntington Bank will have new capabilities to send and receive payments over the CHIPS network, which processes more than $2 trillion in payments daily and is operated by The Clearing House. Participation in CHIPS enhances Huntington’s ability to support high-value payment activity through a secure, reliable and well-established settlement infrastructure widely used by financial institutions globally. By minimizing the amount of capital required to support large-value payment activity, CHIPS also enables participating banks to redeploy liquidity into other productive uses such as lending, investment, and client financing.  

“At Huntington, we drive our Payments strategy by putting our customers at the center of everything we do,” said Deepak Kapoor, Head of Payments Product, Huntington Bank. “Participating in the CHIPS network strengthens our ability to deliver reliable, high-value and scalable payment solutions to our clients and support their domestic payments needs, particularly in an increasingly dynamic economic environment.” 

The CHIPS system continuously matches and offsets payments throughout the day, supporting the settlement of high volume of payments with a comparatively small funding base. This results in significant economic benefits for participants and their clients, including reduced operational friction and improved access to funds.  

Financial institutions globally rely on the CHIPS network for the secure and final settlement of U.S. dollar payments for critical domestic and cross-border activity. 

“The addition of Huntington Bank to the CHIPS network reflects the continued demand for liquidity-efficient, resilient and reliable payment infrastructure,” said Michael Knorr, Senior Vice President, CHIPS Product Management, at The Clearing House. “CHIPS enables participants to reduce funding demands while supporting growing payment volumes, creating meaningful economic value for banks and their clients.” 

As the nation’s largest private-sector settlement system, the CHIPS network provides critical redundancy and liquidity efficiency that keep trillions of dollars moving each day. The CHIPS network enhances the resilience of the U.S. financial system, ensuring that critical high-value transactions can continue to flow without disruption. 

The liquidity efficiency of the CHIPS network, where each dollar of funding supports $26 in settled payments, provides participants with flexibility to manage liquidity strategically while maintaining high throughput and performance. The CHIPS network provides network participants collectively with a daily average economic savings of $15.4 million, translating to annualized savings for participants on the network of approximately $5.5 billion. 

As the CHIPS network continues to grow and evolve, The Clearing House remains focused on expanding participation and enhancing network capabilities, such as increased adoption of ISO 20022 standardized messaging and extended operating hours to deliver additional value to participants across the payments ecosystem. 

FF NEWS TAKE

Huntington Bank is rapidly shedding its image as a standard Midwestern regional lender and stepping into the national big leagues. Following its massive merger with Cadence Bank in February 2026—which expanded its footprint to 1,400 branches across 21 states and pushed its total asset sheet to roughly $279 billion—Huntington required an institutional-grade wholesale payments pipe to service its newly acquired Texas and Southern corporate accounts. Joining CHIPS gives them exactly that, placing them in an elite circle of approximately 50 global financial institutions that directly anchor the U.S. dollar clearing ecosystem.

This move also highlights a broader 2026 trend: regional banks treating payment infrastructure as a core weapon for balance sheet defense. In an unpredictable macroeconomic environment, efficiency is everything. The CHIPS network collectively saves its participants an estimated $15.4 million daily ($5.5 billion annualized) in liquidity overhead. By plugging directly into this net-settlement framework and adopting advanced ISO 20022 standardized messaging, Head of Payments Product Deepak Kapoor is significantly de-risking Huntington’s operational workflows. This transition perfectly complements Huntington’s alternative digital strategies—including its recent launch of the blockchain-based Cari Network for instant deposit token settlement—proving that the bank is aggressively optimizing both traditional wholesale rails and next-generation financial technology.

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