West Bancorporation

Good morning. Thank you for attending today's West Bank Corporation Inc. earnings call. My name is Tania and I will be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Jane Funk, Chief Financial Officer with Bank Corporation. Please go ahead.

Thank you and welcome everybody to our earnings call, quarterly earnings call. Today I've got with me Dave Nelson, our CEO, Harley Oleson, our chief risk officer, Brad Winterbottom, bank president, and Brad Peters, our Minnesota group president. I'll start out with reading 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 with that, we'll turn it over to Dave Nelson, our CEO.

Thank you, Jane, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us and thank you for your continued support and interest in our company. I have just a few general comments I'll make before I turn the call over to others for more details. As you have seen from our release, we had a record first quarter. Our first quarter growth was rather flat, but we do have a strong pipeline. Our credit quality remains very strong. In fact, the first quarter ended 331 was the third consecutive quarter end in which we did not have a single loan in our entire loan portfolio that was 30 days past due. And that, of course, does include the few classified loans that we do have. During the quarter, we added some more bankers and also moved into our recently completed new bank facility in St. Cloud, Minnesota. And we are also now positioned to start construction on our Mankato and our West Des Moines bank buildings during May. During the quarter, we also received recognition from several publications naming West Bank as one of the top performing community banks in America during 2021, including the top 25 lists from Piper Sandler, Raymond James, and S&P Global. Based upon our first quarter performance, our Board of Directors has declared a 25-cent dividend to shareholders of record as of May 11 and payable on May 25. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Harley Olofsson, our Chief Risk Officer.