West Bancorporation

Good day and welcome to the West Bank Corporation quarterly earnings call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero. 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, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Doug Gulling, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Doug Gulling Hey, thank you, Matt. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. On the call today from West Bank Corporation, we have Dave Nelson, our Chief Executive Officer, Harley Olofsson, Chief Risk Officer, Jane Funk, Chief Accounting Officer, Brad Winterbottom, West Bank President, and Brad Peters, our Minnesota Group President. 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. With that, Dave Nelson will start us off.

Thank you, Doug, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us and for your interest and support of our company. Well, everyone is back to work at West Bank. All COVID loan modifications have expired and our bank is operating under normal non-pandemic protocols. West Bank had another record quarter. Our loan growth net of PPP during the first six months or year to date was 6%, and we have a good pipeline. So based on this performance, we have declared a 24-cent second quarter dividend, which will be payable August 25th to shareholders of record as of August 11th of 2021. With that, I'll turn the call over to Harley Olofsson, our Chief Risk Officer. Thank you, Dave, and good morning to everyone.