West Bancorporation

Good morning and welcome to the West Bank Corporation quarterly earnings call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. If 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. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, This event is being recorded. Oh, now we can turn the conference over to Doug Gawling. Please go ahead.

Okay, thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning. On the call today are Dave Nelson, our CEO, Harley Olofsson, our Chief Risk Officer, Brad Winterbottom, West Bank President, and Jane Funk, our Controller and Chief Accounting Officer. And we'll begin with our fair disclosure statement. Comments made during this conference call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any forward-looking statement made by us during this call is based only on information currently available to us and speaks only as of today's date. The company undertakes no obligation to revise or update such statements to reflect current events or circumstances after this call or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. And Dave Nelson will start us off.

Thank you, Doug. And good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We appreciate your interest and support of our company. West Bank achieved another record quarter and record year. And based upon that performance, our board of directors has approved an increase in our quarterly dividend from 21 to 22 cents per share. with a payment date of February 24th and a record date of February 10th. 2020 was quite a year for everyone with very extra unordinary circumstances. We followed every imaginable COVID safety protocol, including limited access, closed lobbies, rotating employees to work from home, etc., much as what all of you have done, but We're very pleased to say we did so with no service interruption. Our alternative delivery channels peaked in usage, and so did our loan and deposit balances. I believe that West Bank could certainly be named as one of our nation's PPP poster banks, and during the March and April timeframe of round one of PPP, we essentially converted our bank into an SBA PPP loan factory with night shifts. We did in excess of 900 PPP loans totaling about 225 million, and now that round two of PPP is underway, we've received about 200 applications, but we're able to stay current without the night shifts. During 2020, we increased our allowance for loan loss by about 70%. Expensed and added $12 million to our allowance, and we still had a record year increasing earnings by 14%. Those are my general comments. I'd now like to turn the call over to our bank president, Brad Winterbottom.