Colony Bankcorp, Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Colony Bank Quarter 4 2024 Conference Call Conference Call. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Thursday, January 23rd, 2025. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brantley Collins. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Rhi. Before we get started, I would like to go through our standard disclosures. Certain statements we make on this call could be constituted as forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Current and prospective investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, but involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Factors that could cause these differences include, but are not limited to, pandemics, variations of the company's assets, businesses, cash flows, financial condition, prospects, and other results of operations. I would also like to add that during our call today, we will reference both our earnings release and our quarterly investor presentation, both of which were filed yesterday. So please have those available to reference. And with that, I will turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Heath Fountain.

Thanks, Brantley, and thank you, everyone, for joining our fourth quarter earnings call today. We're really pleased with our results in the fourth quarter and many of the accomplishments we've made over the course of 2024. Our team worked hard throughout the year to make sure we stayed on track and continued making progress towards our performance goals. This allowed us to finish the year on a positive note and set a foundation to keep that momentum going in 2025. As we mentioned on last quarter's call, we felt that margin had bottomed in the third quarter, and in the fourth quarter, margin did turn the corner and gain 20 basis points up to 2.84%. This led to an increase in net interest income of about $1.9 million quarter over quarter. This was a combination of easing from the Fed, reduced competition and short-term funding costs, as well as growth in non-interest bearing and low-cost interest bearing DDA accounts. Total deposits increased $43 million from the prior quarter and primarily in those low-cost deposit categories. Seasonally, the fourth quarter is where we typically see an increase in our municipal deposits and ag-related deposits. We generally see those balances start to decrease starting in the first and second quarter. On our last call, we also mentioned that we anticipated some loan payoffs of larger loans in the fourth quarter, and that did occur, contributing significantly to our decrease in loan balances for the quarter. These payoffs were at lower rates, so the impact to asset yields was minimal. We are seeing increased activity from our customers, and our loan pipelines are growing, so we do expect to see loan growth return in 2025 and be around 4% to 6% for the year, with more of that growth occurring in the second half of 2025. With M&A activity picking back up and a focus going forward of investing in long-term sustainable growth of the organization, we will be opportunistic in hiring an addition of bankers in our current markets and markets that complement our footprint. Non-interest income increased during the quarter led by our SBSL division. Our complementary business lines are still seeing progress with many having improvement in the fourth quarter compared to the fourth quarter of the prior year. Mortgage did see some slowdown in the quarter due to the significant increase in 10-year treasury rates during the quarter. Volume for SBSL and mortgage are seasonal, and we expect the first quarter 2025 level to be less than what we saw in the fourth quarter for both of those lines of business. We're also proud to announce another consecutive year of increase in our dividend. We feel the quarterly dividend is an important part of our overall return and value creation for all of our shareholders, and it's particularly important to our long-term community shareholders and our employee shareholders. Earlier this month, we announced some changes to our executive team with the promotions and additions of Ed Canup, Daniel Rents, and Laurie Sinn. Their leadership has allowed us to be successful with many of our initiatives over the past few years, and it's that leadership that will continue to drive progress towards achieving our goals. Our president, Dee Copeland, has also taken on additional responsibilities that will support growth and operations. Along with these changes, my focus will shift more to strategy, business development, M&A, and keeping us on the path to reaching our long-term goals. These leadership transitions will drive a better customer experience, enhance innovation, improve operational efficiency, and ensure that we can grow in the right ways going into 2025 and beyond. We also announced in the fourth quarter that we transferred the listing of our common stock to the New York Stock Exchange. We are excited about our partnership with NYSE and believe it'll be beneficial to our shareholders and stakeholders in the long term. Our team had a lot of success in 2024, despite many challenges and headwinds in the industry. We're optimistic as we head into 2025 that we have a good footing that will allow us to reach our goals in the short and long term. In both 2023 and 2024, our team was able to focus internally on operational efficiency, customer delivery, and technology enhancements. With the foundation we have been able to create over the past two years, Going into 2025, our focus will be on growing the organization in the right way that enables us to achieve our overall internal mission, which is to build a sustainable, high-performing, independent bank. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Derek to go over the financials in more detail.