West Bancorporation

Good morning, and welcome to the West Band Corporation Quarterly Earnings Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should 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. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Doug Gouling, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. On the call today, we have the Dave Nelson, our Chief Executive Officer. Jane Funk, Chief Accounting Officer. Brad Winterbottom, West Bank President. Harley Olson, Chief Risk Officer. 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. And Dave Nelson will start us off.

Good morning. Thank you, Doug. Thank you, everyone, for your interest in our company and joining us today. Bus Bank is and has been operating under non-pandemic protocols and we had a great quarter. Year to date our ROE is almost 21%. We've had year to date loan growth of about 10% with deposit growth at almost 20%. We have deployed our excess liquidity We also hired three new commercial bankers for our Des Moines market. And we have already exceeded last year's record earnings in just nine months of operations. Actually, we did it in eight months. But perhaps even most impressive, as of quarter end September 30 of 21, we didn't have a single past due loan past 30 days. So based upon that performance, our board of directors declared a 24-cent dividend per share payable November 24th to shareholders of record on November 10th. With that, I'll turn the call over to Harley Olofsson, our chief risk officer.