Home Bancorp, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the HomeBank Corp's fourth quarter 2023 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to HomeBank Corp's chairman, president, and and Chief Financial Officer David Kirkley. Mr. Kirkley, please go ahead.

Thank you, Ross. Good morning and welcome to HomeBank's fourth quarter 2023 earnings call. Our earnings release and investor presentation are available on our website. I'd ask that everyone please refer to the disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements in the investor presentation and our SEC filings. Now I'll hand it over to John to make a few comments about the quarter. John?

Thank you, David. Good morning, and thank you for joining HomeBank Corp's earnings call today. I hope your morning has started off well. We appreciate your interest in HomeBank Corp as we discuss our results and describe our approach to creating long-term shareholder value. HomeBank's strong performance in 2023 demonstrated our ability to successfully navigate volatile markets. During the fourth quarter, we grew both loans and deposits, improved credit, and reported strong profitability. For the quarter, loans increased $12 million after increasing $137 million in the first three quarters. Our 6.2% loan growth in 2023 was in line with expectation, and we saw contributions from all regions, including our newest, Houston market, which grew 19%. We are pleased with the performance in Houston, which we entered into two years ago with the acquisition of Texan Bank. We continue to invest in Houston as it has outperformed expectations, and we believe there are still good opportunities for growth. We added a commercial banking team in the fourth quarter and plan to relocate branches in the first half of 2024. Fourth quarter deposits increased 73 million, following a 46 million increase in the third quarter. The strong second half deposit generation replaced outflows we saw in the first half, resulting in a year-over-year increase of 1.4%. This resulted in an end-of-year loan-to-deposit ratio of 96.7, which is slightly above the upper end of our target range. Net interest margin, which decreased slightly to 3.69, appears to be stabilizing as asset deals continue to steadily increase and the pace of deposit cost increases slows. With that, I'll turn it over to David, our Chief Financial Officer.