Nathan Race: Hey, good morning. Sorry again, I just want to clarify on the last point around the securities that are maturing in the first quarter. Is the plan just to leave those in cash? Or do you guys plan on redeploying that into securities in the first half of the year, just leaving it for some dry powder to redeploy into loans. As Jason described earlier, we’re not going to we’re not going to speculate.
Thomas Travis: It’s obviously it’s tempting to believe that we’re at the end of a rate cycle. And however, as we all know that I think the wise thing for anyone to do is to not speculate and think you know, and so we’re going to take advantage of the yield curve inversion. And I think today the 10-year somewhere around what is it 4.1 and the Fed’s still over 5%. So I think our belief is that we’ll put it at the Fed and and kind of stay away from any kind of a fixing in and tried to anticipate rates dropping. I think you also remember that liquidity is a real important function of the bank and part of the Rubik’s cube. And so $100 million sounds like a lot of money, but it’s really not relative to the movements on the balance sheet relative to loans and liquidity. So keeping it short and then cash will benefit us on the yield curve side that also maintains that strength and flexibility for liquidity and cash.
Nathan Race: Okay. Got it. That’s helpful. Tom, just curious how you guys are thinking about deposit betas and pricing on the way down you have to get a few Fed rate cuts at some point this year. How do you see that impacting the margin and just kind of overall the trajectory and an eye over the course of 2024.
Thomas Travis: I mean, Kelly or Jason, you want to talk about we’ve budgeted pretty similar for where we are?
Kelly Harris: Yes, I think if you look at our historical them to various rate cycles. We’ve been able to manage it and manage it down at all, foresee that being any different. And so if the Fed cuts and we’ll be able to push down the deposit rates in tandem with the asset side.
Thomas Travis: You want to add to that, Jason?
Jason Estes: No other than we spend a lot of time on these calls talking about Unum and growth rates, and they’re very important things. And I think if you look at our history, we’ve proven that we’re not willing to sacrifice margins for the sake of growth. And so I think you’re going to see our discipline just like it was there last year. It’s going to continue to be the same, right? We’re going to work as hard as we can to maintain it top-tier profitability while we grow this Company.
Nathan Race: Got it. Very helpful. Makes sense. Just one last one for me on kind of excess capital priorities into this year. You guys are operating with pretty healthy capital levels across the board. So just curious, you know what you’re seeing in terms of acquisition opportunities and just kind of your optimum Unisom level on that front?
Thomas Travis: I would say that we are laser focused on acquisition opportunities and it takes laser focus because there’s still a healthy amount of what we call the zombie banks. And I think you guys do too. And and we we continue to have conversations. We are making calls on people that are not for sale. We’re planting seeds and we are constantly evaluating everything we can. And it’s probably going to be a tougher environment for the next two or three or four months for or just this tough of environment, I should say then if rates do start coming down, some of the quote, zombie banks may have an ability to sell. And so you might see a little flurry there in the back half of the year if the rates come down. And so our goal is to position ourselves and trying to be there when we can to do so that we can buy in. And we definitely are we definitely have a mindset to do that.
Nathan Race: Got it. That’s great. And if I’m if I could squeeze actually one last one in, just curious, Jason, maybe in terms of overall migration trends in criticized and classified in the quarter outside of the one energy loan that we’ve touched on?
Jason Estes: Yes, yes. So the quarter, as Tom mentioned in his opening comments, you know, the credit quality of the book, the metrics have actually improved outside of this one credit, not that they were bad other than this deal. But yes, I think if you recall a couple of years ago, we had another charge off that that loan paid in full during the quarter, the remainder of it. And so the balance we had left has all paid off and it’s gone. And then we had another NPA we’ve been carrying that’s about 34% of the NPA balance at the end of the year. And we’re optimistic that that thing could be off of that list here in the maybe even in the first quarter. And so we’re not seeing stress throughout the portfolio that That being said, you know, we’ve got it. Medical relationship has migrated down and about $10 million altogether, but it’s more going positive than there has been negative for the last couple of quarters outside of the one credit.
Brady Gailey: Got you. And just within that context, do you kind of envision the reserve kind of remaining where it was commodity end of the year relative to loans? Or do you guys kind of see it as kind of an overinflated level, just given some of the credit events that occurred late last year?
