West Bancorporation

Good day and welcome to the West Bank Corporation first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance during today's call, press star then zero to be connected with an operator. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Doug Gulen, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our conference call this morning. On the call, we have Dave Nelson, our Chief Executive Officer, Carly Olofsson, Chief Risk Officer, Jane Funk, Chief Accounting Officer, Brad Winterbottom, West Bank President, and Brad Peters, Executive Vice President in charge of our Minnesota location. And I'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. Dave Nelson will start us off.

Thank you, Doug, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I'd like to start off by first introducing Brad Peters, who has been started with West Bank January 1st, 2019, to lead our Minnesota expansion, and Brad was just recently named as a policymaking officer during our organizational meetings this week, and will lead all of our Minnesota markets, and we will hear from Brad a little later during the call. In fact, we'll have several presenters today, so I'll shorten my comments, but I would say we just had the best quarter ever during our 128th year history. It's been a long time since I've seen a quarterly return on equity of 20% with an efficiency ratio under 40. Based on that performance, our directors have declared a quarterly dividend and increased the dividend from 22 cents to 24 cents per share. The payment date on May 26th to shareholders of record as of May 12th. I'd like to share some good news. Recently, West Bank has received three national accolades. One of the ways we measure our directional progress towards our vision is how our financial performance compares to others. And the performance rankings of banks across America for 2020 are just now beginning to be released. During this past March and this month of April, West Bank has received three national accolades for top performance. The 2020 Raymond James Community Cup recognizes the top 25 community banks across America with assets as small as $500 million up to $10 billion. West Bank was ranked number 21 in America and the only bank in Iowa or Minnesota to be recognized and one of very few from the Midwest. West Bank also recently, well, West Bank has received this award, the Raymond James Community Cup, now seven out of the past eight years. S&P Global ranked West Bank number 10 in our nation on their list of the top 50 large community banks across America, both public and private, with assets from $3 to $10 billion. Again, West Bank was the only Iowa or Minnesota bank to make that list. and one of very few from the Midwest. Finally, Bank Director Magazine just published their list of the top 25 banks across America with assets greater than $1 billion with the lowest or most favorable efficiency ratio and listed West Bank as number 19 in America. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Harley Oleson, our Chief Risk Officer.