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 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. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jane Funk, CFO. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Welcome, everybody. Good morning. Welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call for West Bank Corporation, Inc. Thank you for joining us. I'm Jane Funk, the CFO. I've got joining me today Dave Nelson, our CEO, Harley Olofsson, our Chief Risk Officer, Brad Winterbottom, our Bank President, and Brad Peters, our Minnesota Group President. and I will start off by reading the 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 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 with that, I'll turn it over to Dave Nelson.

Thank you, Jane. Welcome everyone. Thank you for your interest in our company. I have some general comments and then we'll turn it over to others for more detail. Another great quarter and another record year for West Bank, despite the pandemic and other challenges. West Bank achieved another record year by a significant margin as we increased earnings by 52%. We did this by growing loans 16%. We grew our investment securities portfolio by 77%, and deposits grew another 12%. We had return on equity of 20.3%, and West Bank stock appreciated 61% during 2021. As of year end, 12-31-21, We did not have a single loan 30 days past due in our entire $2.4 billion loan portfolio. This performance allowed our board of directors to declare an increase to our quarterly dividend of 25 cents per share, which is payable February 23rd to shareholders of record as of February 9th. We also have a number of initiatives underway, including four new bank buildings that are all in different stages of development. When we started our most recent Minnesota expansion during 2019 with new loan production offices in St. Cloud, Mankato, and Owatonna, Minnesota, all utilizing rented office space, it only took us nine months to achieve profitable operations. And our plan is, has always been to construct bank-owned permanent facilities in each market. Our Sartell location, which is a suburb of St. Cloud, Minnesota, is nearing completion. We have purchased our Mankato site. The design is complete with construction to begin this spring. We're still on the hunt for our perfect site in Owatonna. And the design phase for our new West Des Moines headquarters building is almost complete. The site has been purchased with construction beginning this spring as well in West Des Moines. With that, I'll turn the call over to Harley. Harley Oleson, our Chief Risk Officer.