Good day, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the review of Q4 2022 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star one on your telephone. You'll then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Hoppy Cole. Please go ahead. Well, good morning, everybody. I'm Hoppy Cole, President and CEO of The First Bancshares, and we've got several of our team members with us today. We have DeeDee Lowery, our CFO. We have JJ Fletcher, our Chief Lending Officer, George Noonan, our Chief Credit Officer, and Leonard Moreland, who I'm proud to say is the former CEO of Heritage Southeast Bank and is currently the Regional President for Georgia in our company. As always, we've got some prepared comments, and we'll talk about some high-level events that went on during the quarter. I'll change it. I'll give it over to the individual areas, and they'll add some additional color in each of their respective areas of expertise. To start, we had a good quarter, but an exceptional year. We're really excited, given all that we accomplished in 2022 about how we're positioned and some of the tailwinds that we're gonna enjoy from some of the acquisitions that we did and some of the organic growth that we had in 2022. For the quarter, we closed in the Heritage Southeast transaction, effective one one. We were very excited because we stayed within 150 days from announcement to actual legal day one, which in this environment, we were very pleased with. The systems conversion is scheduled for March 31 on Heritage Southeast. During the quarter, we also completed the system conversion of Beach Bank. Early December, we converted, and the transaction went very smooth with minimal client impact. If you look together, those two acquisitions added approximately $2.3 billion in assets to the company. Today we're about $8.1 billion in total assets. In addition to providing increased scale, it really is an inflection point for the growth opportunities for our company in that these two acquisitions give us a meaningful presence in new markets in Atlanta, Georgia, Savannah, Jacksonville, Tampa, and really increased our market share in the Florida Panhandle. It's not just scale, it's not just opportunities. They gave us also a real high quality group of community bankers in both markets. Again, we think that these markets are really an inflection point and will help us enjoy some tailwinds going into 2023. In addition to the acquisitive growth, we had a great year and a great quarter in terms of organic growth. For the quarter, we were up $55 million in net loans or 6% on an annualized basis. For the year, $316 million of net loan growth or 11%. A really good year, really good, sort of tailwind pushing us in terms of unfunded commitments as well. JJ will dig into that a little more, and we feel really good about where we're going in terms of growth for 2023. We're also pleased in the quarter with where the margin came out. On the core margin was only down 3 basis points. If you guys will remember, we guided the margin compression in the Q4 because of the seasonality of our deposits. If you look back over history, because you know, we've got pretty good public money deposit portfolio. They tend to cycle through the year. The Q4 is our seasonal low point. We're really pleased we were able to manage the margin and only keep it relatively flat or essentially keep it relatively flat quarter-over-quarter. Dede will offer a lot more color in terms of margin management and where we came out for the quarter. We also took an interesting strategy. At the end of the Q3, we made a really strong move in terms of our posted deposit rates. On a percentage basis, normally than we would usually do. We moved from the lower end of tier of our competitive set across our markets for our interest-bearing deposits. We moved to the midpoint, we backed off of it. We made a fairly large move at the end of the quarter so that when people opened their statements at the beginning of the Q4, they would see we made a fairly large move, and it would slow some of the runoff that we were experiencing. I think, you know, we were pleased, essentially only have deposits down 1% quarter-over-quarter. We haven't moved our posted rates since then. We've just been matching around the margin sort of when we had to. Finally, credit metrics continue to improve. George will dig into that a little bit, pass-throughs, non-performers improved during the quarter and during the year. Again, a good quarter. We're pleased with the quarter, an exceptional year. We think we enjoy some tailwinds, some real tailwinds in terms of growth and earnings going into 2023. With that, I'll hand it off to DeeDee to dig into the financials a little bit more. Okay, great. Thanks, Hoppy. Obviously, as Hoppy mentioned on our two acquisitions, we do have a little noise again in this quarter, really related to acquisition charges, on both the Beach transaction and then the Heritage, HSBI transaction that closed January 1st. A couple of things I wanted to kind of reiterate that we discussed last quarter was that we did expect margin compression. And really that was coming from, as we have in the past prior to COVID, due to the seasonality of our deposit portfolio, we would be in a borrowed position, typically late Q3, Q4 into the beginning of the year until some of the funds money, come back in the beginning of the year. We talked about that a lot last quarter and wanted to kind of bring that up again to mention. Also we talked about that we would have increased deposit costs due to our rate increases on our deposit portfolio. Hoppy mentioned a few minutes ago about how we did make a big, you know, a significant move at the end of September to bring us from kind of well below our peers to kind of right at our peer average. You know, we did that early and increased our deposit costs. It impacted October, but then it leveled off for November and December. We are matching and managing our good key core deposit relationships on a case-by-case basis and continuing to do that as some of the other competition is offering some higher rate specials. You know, we're just managing them case by case. For the Q4, we did report earnings of $16.3 million or $0.67. On operating basis, earnings were $17.2 million or $0.71. This did compare to $19.6 million last quarter, $0.85, which was a decrease of about $2.4 million. If you recall, quarter, we talked about the non-accrual interest income recapture we had in the Q3 of a million and a half dollars. That was 10 basis points to the margin, a million and a half for this decrease. During the Q4, we always have additional expenses related to year-end accruals, salary benefits, was about $700,000. Those are a couple big items that we, you know, to compare between third and Q4. We are very pleased that we remained flat for the quarter on our margin. I mean, on our income here, we feel like with those two items that we basically maintained where we were, really less contraction than we initially thought we might have on the margin. You know, we have a great low cost diversified deposit base, and I think that showed this quarter for us. We're very pleased with our quarter. On a yearly basis, Hoppy mentioned we had a great year and we reported $62.9 million. On operating basis, that was $68.3 million, and that compared to $64.4 million for 2021. That was a 6% increase or $3.9 million. Also just to note, 2021 did include eleven and a $500,000 in PPP fee income that was only $1.7 million in 2022. We feel like basically overcoming that $950,000 of PPP fee income and then increasing that $4 million year-over-year was a great year for us. We had just hoped kind of at the beginning to cover the PPP fees, and we did that and more, so we're happy with that. As we mentioned, our margin did contract on a core basis, 3 basis points, because if you remember, we reported 350 last quarter. The 10 basis points of that was related to that recapture. Really the 340 we mentioned would be, we would have contraction, and we did 3 basis points to 337. Loan yields did increase 31 basis points when you adjust out for that recapture for last quarter, for the Q3. So we were very pleased with loan yields increasing 31 basis points. Our deposit cost of deposits increased 31 basis points as well for the Q4, which we feel is, you know, a really acceptable beta on that increase. When you look at our cost of deposits for the whole year, where we were Q4 of 2021- Q4 of 2022, it's basically the same increase. We were at basically $0.19 cost of deposits for the Q4 of last year to increase 32 basis points for this quarter. I think given that Fed Funds increased 425 basis points over that course of 2022 and our deposit costs only increased 31 basis points. We're very happy with that. We also mentioned last quarter that we projected our margin to be in the range of 350-360 with a Fed Funds rate of 4.50%, and we're still reiterating that today. You know, we do have Heritage obviously coming on 1/1 that will add to our margin. We feel like that's still acceptable for 2023. A couple of notes on our ratios. Our operating ratios for the Q4, well our ROA was a 1.07%, and a return on our average tangible common equity was a 16.83%, and our efficiency ratio operating was 59.34%. We feel kind of given everything that happened in the Q4 with the increasing cost of deposits and... Those were great metrics for the quarter. Our capital ratios, our TCE of 6.9% and our leverage ratio was 9.4%, and our total risk-based capital was 16.7%. Feel all of our capital ratios are still very good and we're very pleased with the quarter. That's all my prepared remarks, Hoppy. If you want to take it back over. Thank you, DeeDee. JJ, now would you give us some color on the loan portfolio for the quarter? Yes, thank you, Hoppy. As Hoppy said, we were pleased with organic loan growth of about $55 million in the quarter, particularly given the headwinds and rising rate environments and Fed moves, a lot of uncertainty during the quarter. We were very proactive in moving up uncommitted rates reviewing all renewals and modifications very timely and picking up yield at every opportunity during the quarter. A bit of an outlier, George may cover this, we also have. About $8 million in criticized and classified loans that paid off at the very end of the year. Mostly I think the hospitality field as a result of COVID downgrade. Very positive there. Q4 was also the first full quarter of integration with the Beach legacy portfolio. Happy to report that they had a very positive contribution to the overall bank. Out of that $55 million, approximately $20 million of that growth was attributable to the Beach Bank portfolio or legacy portfolio. We also finished the year on a high note with about $106 million in originations in December, a strong close to the year which helped our year-end numbers. We continue to track our loan payoffs and pay downs. About 10% loss to competition remained constant. We focus on that to make sure that we are not losing business to our competitors. Also with the integration of Beach, our trailing unfunded commitments that we track pretty closely, it ranged from $350 million-$370 million. We had a nice bump there to about $424 million at the end of the year with the lines and availability from the Beach Bank portfolio. Pipelines, as we expected, did compress about 20% at year-end. However, we're comparing that to really record year throughout 2022. About $422 million in total combined pipeline at the end of the year, so we're pleased with that number. Also note that we had some areas of a positive gain, private bank for one, which continued a stellar year in 2022. Then Tampa, Beach Bank Tampa region actually had a increase at year-end in their pipeline. I'll just close with private bank. I wanted to notate that also with the integration of Beach, we were able to fully put in our specialty healthcare division in the Q4, and we have those locations strategically along the Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Gulf Coast area, and then in Tampa. We're looking forward to expanding that throughout the year in 2023. Hoppy, I'll turn it back over to you. Thanks, JJ. Appreciate the update. George, could you give some color on our credit metrics performance for the quarter? Will do, Hoppy. Thank you. Just to give you some, basically kind of on an annual look, just to keep credit metrics highlights, Hoppy referred to delinquencies. Our 30-day past due loans for the year averaged what we think is a very manageable 33.5 basis points for the year and continued to improve from Q1 through the Q4. Continuing improvement there. Our total past dues plus loans on non-accrual at year-end were acceptable, about 49 basis points compared to total loans. We think that's pretty good place to be at year-end. Non-performing assets as a percentage of loans plus OREO actually, we were able to get those cut in half during the year. We started quarter one with about 100 basis points in that metric, and we finished the year at right at 47 basis points. Some good performance and results there. A lot of that came as a result of one transitional change in a large non-accrual, but we had lots of other OREO progress too, which we'll cover in a minute. Our loans on non-accrual were reduced by a little over 50%, so that had a very positive impact. While we do show an actual increase in OREO for a net increase of about $1.99 million for the year, we keep in mind that also includes taking on in August approximately $8.1 million in Beach Bank OREO at the end of the Q3. That did have an impact on our year-end OREO, but we were able to reduce. Of that $8.1 million, we got a sale of $6 million in OREO out of the Beach bucket in the Q4. That got us back to $1.99 million for the year in terms of increase. We managed through the sale of OREO throughout the year to end up with about a $214 hundred thousand net gain on sale. Good marketing efforts and interest in our OREO and it's always good to have a net gain on sale as you're liquidating exposed properties. Charge-offs for the year were manageable. We had $660 thousand in charge-offs, but that was offset by recoveries of almost $2.5 million. We had net recoveries actually of $1.88 million. Essentially for every dollar we charged off, we recovered $3.85. We like that ratio and hope that will continue into 2023. As far as our risk rating of our loan portfolio, criticized and classified loans showed some good improvement. We had a net reduction of criticized and classifieds for the year of a little over $30 million. That of course included taking on the Beach Bank C&I loans, and we're working with those to try to achieve some upgrades into the Q1 and Q2 of the year. At the end of the year, our special mention loans were a little over $43 million and $58.5 million for substandard. Comparative basis, C&C loans at Q1 were 24% of capital plus ACL at the end of the year, 15%. Positive trend there. We believe we're adequately reserved with an ACL in the 103 basis point range. We took $6.9 million in provisions during the year. That included a Q4 $705,000 provision as well as the provision for the end of the Q3 for the Beach Bank PCD to mark for about $1.3 million. Those were our key metrics for the year. Generally stable and favorable. Obviously with the macroeconomic trends out there and the direction we're all expecting, we are maintaining a lot of focus as well as being adaptive while still adhering to our long-standing corporate credit culture. We remain focused on stressing interest rates on our maturing loans. We have a little over $305 million-$310 million or so in loans maturing in 2023. The average weighted rate for that segment portfolio is a little under 5%. We can expect to see, you know, 250 basis point to 300 basis point elevation in rates on that segment of the portfolio. We are looking closely at gross and operating margins of our borrowers for increased elevated expenses that are impacting those margins. Obviously their continued capacity for acceptable coverages on the leverage side. For non-owner occupied commercial real estate segments, we are ongoing, you know, monitoring for tenant lease quality, strength, terms and conditions. That is one area in a lot of our subsegments in CRE, such as multifamily, hospitality, and other segments, rates and can be adjusted outside of a fixed lease. So we are paying close attention in particular to the retail side. And in closing, I'd say I believe we're positioned well for any changes ahead we might have with the impact of rising rates in our borrowers and look forward to 2023 continued performance. Thank you, George. Appreciate the comments, additional color on the credit book. That concludes our prepared comments. I think, wait a minute, Benny had to remind me, Leonard. I'm sorry, Leonard. We got Leonard Moreland, the former CEO of Heritage, and our current regional president, will update us on Heritage's performance for the quarter. Sorry about that, Leonard. That's all right, Hoppy. Thank you everyone. Glad to have this opportunity. First, I'd like to just say, it was our goal at HSBI to not only deliver a quality organization into The First organization, but also do so with a lot of momentum for the 2023 year. For the quarter for HSBI and HSB, pretty many moving parts, especially last month of the year, culminating in our year-end closing the trans quarter and the year are as follows. Total assets appear at $1.6 billion. This was down substantially from the Q3, ending assets of $1.7 billion from the redu transactions involving the alignment of the company's balance sheet with that of The First and the retirement of the HSBI debt. Deposits declined during the quarter $103 million- $1.4 billion. Approximately $40 million of this decrease is associated with normal cyclical activities by our business clients. The remaining roughly $60 million was related to clients seeking higher rates of returns than the bank was offering on interest-bearing deposits. The liquidity position of HSBI allowed the retention of core low cost deposits while allowing higher cost single service clients to move outside of the bank. Loans grew during the quarter $49 million and concluded the year at $1.2 billion, a $136 million or 12.9% increase for 2022. Loan growth was robo-robust across all sectors, with non-farm, non-residential and commercial and industrial leading the way with double-digit growth. Asset quality remained strong with total delinquencies, including non-accruals of 0.33% of total loans. Total non-performing assets into the year at 0.22% of total assets, and net charge-offs for the year were 2 basis points of total loans. Earnings for the quarter were impacted by the merger. Net income before tax for the quarter was a loss of $8.8 million. Core earnings would have been approximately $8.2 million pre-tax and $6.2 million after tax or $0.85 per share. This compares to $6 million or $0.83 per share for the Q3 of 2022, excluding transaction related costs. The net interest margin continues to improve and concluded the year at 4.65%. The team of bankers at HSB has spent the past six months of working with The First team to ensure a smooth transition over the coming months. We're off to a great start. With that, Hoppy, I'll conclude my comments. Thank you, Leonard. Great quarter. Appreciate it. As you can see, we're really excited about how we're positioned going forward for upcoming year and beyond. We've got some real significant tailwinds, particularly in terms of new opportunities for growth and some real tailwinds in terms of EPS growth, we believe. That concludes our prepared comments, and we'll open it up for questions. Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. One moment for our first question. Our first question comes from Matt Olney from Stephens. Your line is now open. Thanks. Good morning, everybody. Hey, Matt. How are you? I'm great. I'm great. Thanks for all the prepared remarks. Just a few questions here. Wanna clarify on the deposit commentary. I think what you said was you made the big move in posted rates in September, so Q4 would have received the full impact of this, and you've not made any meaningful changes to those posted rates since then. I guess one, is that right? Then two, as you look at your current posted rates versus your competition and what they're doing, how do you feel about the need to make another catch up in posted rates over the next few weeks and months? You're exactly right on the timing. The last week of the month, we made a material move to get to the midpoint of our competitive set, and so we got the full impact of that in the quarter. We just haven't seen That's really stymied or slowed down the runoff we saw in some of those interest-bearing accounts, and we haven't felt the need to move those, and not only interest-bearing transaction accounts, but CD rates as well. We haven't had to move those to maintain our deposit base. Given where we think the cash flow coming back to us, the growth in public money, the combination with HSBI, the liquidity that's gonna provide us because we'll liquidate their bond. We're in the process of liquidating their bond portfolio, and we'll take that to pay down the borrowed. You know, we were net borrowed for the quarter last quarter, which normal seasonality our public money would come back, we'd pay that off anyway, but we're kinda getting a $200 million head start with liquidating the bond portfolio at HSBI. We don't feel like we're gonna have the same percentage increase at least over the next quarter or two that we had in this last quarter. Okay. That's helpful, Hoppy. Thanks for that. I think DeeDee mentioned that there were some higher borrowings in the Q4 from the seasonal aspect. Have those also been paid down since the quarter? We're working on that right now, Matt. As Hoppy mentioned, the public funds tend to come in a little bit more later in January and February. We're in the process of selling the bond portfolio from Heritage, and so we have reduced that one. It was $130 at year-end, we have reduced that so far, but we're not completely gone yet, but we anticipate that will be shortly. Shortly about mid-February. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Somewhere in that regard. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Got it. Just to clarify, Hoppy, I think you said you already sold the $200 million of securities from the transaction. Is that right? Just remind me of expectations of securities cash flows, you know, over the course of the year. We've done about a third of it so far because it's a whole bunch of smaller securities. We've done about a third of it so far, but we should have it complete in a couple of weeks. Yes. That's why we feel pretty confident about paying out that net borrowed position as well as the public monies coming in. Okay. As far as the margin that you talked about, the 3.50%-3.60%, just clarify the timing of when that's set for, and then is that include or exclude some of the accretion from the transactions? Thanks. Generally we're kinda looking at that excluding some of the accretion from the transaction for Heritage. I think the timing, you know, will really kind of pick up probably into the Q2 or so because we still have the borrowing costs on for this, some portion of this quarter. I anticipate hoping to it start that increasing up later in the year. Way we think about it, Matt, is we're starting the year at $3.37, and we would average, say, $3.50 or so for the year. It can kind of linear if we're averaging in for that. Does that make sense? Yep, that makes sense. Okay, I'll step back in the queue. Thank you. Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Matt. Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Catherine Mealor from KBW. Your line is now open. Thanks. Good morning. Good morning, Catherine. How are you today? I'm great. How are you? Doing great. Can't complain. Nice to see the NIM guidance was unchanged, though. Very different from what we're seeing in other banks, thank you for that. One other thing I wanted to talk about was just the size of the balance sheet and growth, your growth outlook for the year. I feel like when we were thinking about The First with the Beach deal and Heritage, we thought that growth would actually kind of accelerate as we moved into 2023. You know, most are lowering their growth guidance for the year. How are you thinking about just kind of organic growth for y'all this coming year? You know, in terms of growing the size of the balance sheet, we think it's kind of flattish. That's what we're projecting to try to be conservative, Catherine. We do think there will be a remix. You know, and we talked about being able to essentially redeploy some of this liquidity we've got coming out of the bond portfolio and that we're going to get out of Heritage Southeast. We're going to use that to fund our loan growth as we move forward. I would say, you know, we're forecasting an increased loan to deposit ratio and more of a remix into the loan book and a 5% or so growth rate in terms of net loan growth and essentially funding that organic, you know, funding that through the existing deposit structure, not having to go out and really grow the size of the balance sheet and pay up to do that. Okay, great. Back on the securities book. You will, if you're selling most of Heritage's securities, but in terms of just your core book, do you expect that to also decline throughout the year as you kind of, as you just mentioned, you're remixing the balance sheet? How much of kind of a decline outside of Heritage would you expect for us to see out of the bond book this year? The way the bond book is set up is it provides us about a quarter, about $250 million or so a year of cash flow out of the portfolio. It's laddered out, so that we get about, you know, $1 billion buck dollars or so over the next four years. That $250 plus prepayment speed and things will provide significant cash flow out of the loan portfolio to be able to fund our 5%-7% loan growth. Great. Okay, perfect. Then on the expense guide, I know y'all are typically very quick in realizing cost savings. Can you just help us think about the timing of the Heritage cost savings and maybe the, how we think about the expense run rate in the next couple of quarters? The Heritage cost savings will be, I think we modeled 50%, 75%... 75%. For 2023. You know, as Hoppy mentioned earlier, we're anticipating that merger, I meant the systems conversion March 31st. Typically that, you know, through that period and then a couple of months after, the staffing, you know, typically the advertising agreements stay on for a couple of months post that. I would be, you know, full quarter would be Q3 as far as for the, you know, salaries and benefits piece of that. You know, run rate, I'm kind of looking at, I'm still trying to finish up my budget for 2023, I'm thinking that kind of looking at there, where they've been and ours is probably going to be $40-ish, $42 or so million a quarter in expenses. That's just kind of a, what I'm looking at right now, I'm still working through the budget. Give or take $1 million or so there. Million here, there. Million here, there. That sounds- But that's- Q1, would you expect to your point with the conversion in March, Q1 should be higher than that? Yes. Yes. Kind of get to that. Go ahead, Catherine. I was going to say, you're higher Q1, but then you get into that maybe $40 million-$42 million level as you move through the year. Exactly. Yeah. I was kind of looking at a total, you know, $165 or so somewhere in that range. Yeah, it'll take till the later part of the year to get to that $42 probably. Got it. Okay, that makes sense. All right, that's great. It sounds like I'll pop out of the queue. Thank you. Thanks, Catherine. Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, that is star one one. Again, if you would like to ask a question, that is star one one. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Christopher Marinac from Janney. Your line is now open. Hey, thanks. Good morning. Thanks for hosting the call. Just want to go back to the loan to deposit ratio. Hoppy, you mentioned it, but I didn't fully catch it. Would it increase from here or not? I understand the point about funding internally with Sid's measures you just said. Sure, Chris. I think you said do we expect loan deposit ratio to increase? Correct. Yes, we do. We do. We don't plan on growing the size of the balance sheet per se in order to fund the loan growth. We'd like to add some more leverage, and we think that we can. We ended the quarter at what? About 68 on average. 68. I think we're projecting 72% loan deposit ratio is kind of our visibility, Chris. Okay. A few points from here. Great. Would your use of the debt, which I know is low, would that kind of stay the same, or would that actually go down just given how you're funding internally? You said use of debt, Chris? Yes. Yes. All the borrowings combined. Yeah, no, all the borrow that, those would be, those would decline. We hope to, as we took it down the path of the seasonality of those public funds come in, the selling of Heritage's portfolio, we expect them to not be borrowed post the Q1. Leonard, Chris, Leonard noted in his comments, part of the reduction in the size of their balance sheet would paying off some of the debt that they had, as we put the two balance sheets together. Yep, I caught that. Thank you for that reminder. I guess just to go back to the deposit bid, I know you mentioned in Max question earlier about just the pricing in September, et cetera. Are betas in general going to have a little bit more lift at the moment, or would they actually sort of trend down? I guess I'm curious if you, if you think about betas holistically, but also maybe on some of the perceived sensitive areas like the public funds. Would those have any more movement than you have historically seen? Well, I can't tell you I've ever managed or we've ever managed through similar scenarios we've had over the last couple of years. I told somebody the other day, "Hey, this commercial bank is supposed to be boring." We're not supposed to have all this volatility. In any event, we don't feel the deposit pressure right now that we felt at the end of. Literally, we looked up at the end of September, and $200 million went away, like, just in a matter of weeks. That's why we agonized over that decision, should we move on a percentage basis this large? But I think it was the right decision because it really stymied the runoff. We continue to see banks out there doing deposit specials that are really high. Our strategy has been, we don't feel the pressure to move right now on our transaction rates. In our CD specials, we're still keeping below our competitors because we're just trying to retain the money that we have because we don't have to grow the balance sheet to make our returns because of remixing and taking our, you know, we're so liquid, the ability to redeploy that in the loan book, we don't have to. That doesn't mean we're not going to grow it where we find opportunity. That don't mean that. We just don't feel the need to get up there and compete at the top end of the market. Having said that, I don't feel that way now, and it seems like the consumer, when they were first hearing how much rates were going up, they're going, "Well, gosh, rates are skyrocketing." Now the feel is kind of rates are plateauing a bit. I know I've read some other guidance where people are talking about beta's accelerating. I don't, and I could be way off. We don't feel it right now. We put that CD special in, I can't remember exactly what month that was. We had adjusted that once during the quarter, but that's been, we haven't changed that. I really don't think we're just doing these one-off matches. We've been doing that basically November, December and continuing a little bit in January. I just don't see it moving our deposit cost that much moving forward. Chris, the posted rate on our current special is no secret. Our current special is nine-month CD for 305. Right. Are we $170? I think. What's the $175. 175 for 19 months. We've been able to kind of retain at that. Again, those are posts. Everybody knows they're out there. Again, we're just fighting around the margin. The other thing I would say to you, what we've talked about not necessarily growing, about being aggressive and having to pay up to grow the balance sheet. Where we started this, you know, the markets that we added this last year are very different and definitely an inflection point for our company. The ability to grow non-interest bearing deposits is even greater in Tampa, Savannah, Jacksonville, Atlanta, particularly Atlanta, Jacksonville, Tampa, where we have a much more C&I or there's much more C&I opportunity and our treasury management services become much more important. We definitely will grow the balance sheet or have a strategy to grow non-interest bearing deposits as we get more C&I focused. No, that's helpful background. Thank you both for that. I guess just my follow-up, Hoppy, just more strategically, are you comfortable not doing an acquisition this next 12 months? I mean, you have a lot to do internally and obviously want many great things ahead of you, as you discussed. We are. We absolutely are. As you know, we've done a number of acquisitions and a lot of that has, in order to drive our profitability and growth, we sort of need those acquisitions. The markets I just talked about, we feel strongly will provide the sort of growth we need to make the returns that we've sort of put out there. Great. Thanks again for taking my questions this morning. Thank you, Chris. Thanks, Chris. Thank you. One moment for our next question. We have a follow-up question from Matt Olney from Stephens. Your line is now open. Thanks. Just want to ask about the non-interest income in the Q4, a little bit slower. It looks like mortgage drove that. Just any other commentary on the Q4 fees and the outlook from here. Thanks. You're right, Matt. It was basically all mortgage. It was off more than we really anticipated. That continues to be a little bit flat. As you know, we have a pretty good private banking, so we private banking market share. We do a lot of multifamily in that book for the high net worth individuals. Those pipelines look pretty good, but the basic mortgage pipeline, I think, are still pretty slow. Okay. I think Heritage had a pretty decent fee income platform. When we kind of layer this together, DeeDee, what kind of fee range can you give us for the Q1? Actually, let me see one second right here, Matt. I think maybe in the 10, 12, maybe. I really haven't finished that section, kind of going through all that in detail and adding Heritage in. I really hate to give a number, but I think it definitely may be, you know, $10 million or $11 million there, but that's just kind of a guess. I mean, a good guess at the moment. Okay. Maybe we can follow up on that, on that later. Yeah, we can definitely. Matt, you've been around Dee Dee to know her guesses are pretty good, though. That's right. Exactly right. Well, I guess just stepping back a little bit, Hoppy, when you announced the Heritage deal last year, I think you mentioned the goal of achieving that $4 EPS run rate with the full integration of Beach, full integration of Heritage. Since we talked about that, I think the deposit market's changed. You mentioned the adjustments you've made on your deposit rates. I'm just trying to appreciate how impactful that change in deposit world has been, that could, you know, impact that $4 EPS goal or any other puts and takes that are material that could, that we should think about in relation to that $4 EPS goal. Thanks. I mean, Yeah, I think so, Matt. I mean, what we're looking at and going through and working through right now, I still think because of where I think on the asset earnings side, we did pick up as far as besides just looking at increased costs on the deposit side. I think with the savings and adding Heritage in, I still think by the end of the year, we can shoot for that $4 run rate for next year. We still feel confident in that, Matt. One thing we, you know, we didn't really talk about, Legacy Bank is slightly asset sensitive in the quarter, HSBI really improves our asset sensitivity on the whole. We still think there's a little... That's why we're guiding back to sort of the 3.50% margin, 3.50%-3.60% we were talking about. That kind of gets us back to that $4 EPS run rate back half of the year. At this point, what we see is we feel confident in that. Okay. I would like to add, I had in my notes here, I didn't mention just for reference, we did issue $6.9 million in new shares to the Heritage HSBI shareholders. When y'all are working on your calculations, we all have the same shares. If not, you'll be getting a follow-up call from DeeDee about making sure your share counts are right. $6,092,422. How about that? Yeah, I'll make sure to capture that in the model update. Thanks. Thanks, guys. Good deal. Thanks, Matt. Thank you. I'm showing no further questions. I would now like to turn the call back over to Hoppy Cole for closing remarks. Well, thanks everyone. Appreciate your attendance today. As you can see, we think we're in really good shape and look forward to 2023. Thanks for joining and we'll be in touch next quarter. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may disconnect.