West Bancorporation

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the West Bank Corporation Incorporated Earnings School. My name is Irene, and I will be coordinating this event. I would like to turn the conference over to our host, Jane Funk, Chief Financial Officer. Jane, please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us on the call this morning. Today on the call we've got myself, Dave Nelson, our CEO and president of WTBA. We've got Harley Olofsson, our chief risk officer, Brad Winterbottom, our West Bank president, and Brad Peters, our Minnesota region president. I'll start out reading our fair disclosure statement. Any 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, I'll turn the call over to Dave Nelson to get us started.

Thank you, Jane, and thank you everyone for joining us. We very much appreciate your interest in our company. We had another good quarter with strong performance metrics. I just have a few general comments and then we'll turn the call over to others for more details. We have declared a 25 cent dividend to common stockholders payable August 24th to shareholders of record as of August 10th, 2022. While the increasing rate environment is putting pressure on our margin, our credit quality has continued to improve to the point where we almost have an absence of problem loans or even past due loans. And most of our communities in which we do business are all sitting on record building permits. of the impact that our inflationary marketplace, coupled with the corresponding increasing interest rates, will have on delaying or perhaps stalling some of this activity remains unknown. However, in any event, we have a strong pipeline and pristine credit quality. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chief Risk Officer, Mr. Harley Olofsson.