How to assign variables to some words of a string in a bash loop?

Question

bash

Good afternoon!
Sometimes you need to pull out some words from the lines of a file, usually I do it like this:

cat ./file | while read line; do
  f=`echo "$line" | cut -f1 -d":"`
  s=`echo "$line" | cut -f2 -d":"`
  t=`echo "$line" | cut -f3 -d":"`
done

And already with these variables I work.
Is there an easier way to assign variables?