A small North Georgia bank failed Friday, the first to close in the state since July.
Braselton-based Hometown Community Bank was seized and sold to Easley, S.C.-based CertusBank.
Two Hometown branches will reopen Saturday under the CertusBank flag, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said.
CertusBank agreed to assume $108.9 million of the failed bank’s deposits and the bulk of its $124.6 million in assets.
Hometown’s failure will cost the FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund, the backstop that protects depositors, $36.7 million.
Hometown is the 10th bank to fail in Georgia this year, but the pace of closures has slowed dramatically from the three previous years amid modest economic improvement and some mending of the state’s beleaguered banking industry.
Georgia leads the nation with 84 failures since mid-2008. The state has had at least 21 failures in each of the past three years.
Hometown was founded in mid-2005 and invested heavily, like many of the state’s failed banks, in real-estate-development lending.
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