West Bancorporation

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the West Bank Corporation, Inc. Earnings Call. My name is Sam, and I'll be coordinating your call today. If you would like to ask a question during the presentation, you may do so by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to your host, Jane Funk, CFO of West Bank Corporation, to begin. Jane, please go ahead.

Thank you. We just want to thank everybody for joining us this afternoon. Hopefully, everybody made the conversion from our Friday morning calls to our Thursday afternoon calls. Today I've got with me Dave Nelson, our CEO, Harley Oleson, our chief risk officer, Brad Winterbottom, our bank president, and Brad Peters, our Minnesota region 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 statements 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 statements to reflect current events or circumstances after this call or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. And now I'll turn it over to Dave Nelson to start our conference.

Thank you, Jane, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We are providing expanded reporting in our printed materials this quarter, and we hope that you've noticed that, and we would welcome and appreciate any thoughts you might have about the format and the content. I have a few general comments, and then I will turn the call over to the others for more details. We had a very solid third quarter with strong performance metrics, including return on equity of 21% and return on assets of 1.32%. Based upon that performance, we declared a quarterly dividend of 25 cents per share payable on November 23rd to stockholders of record on November 9th, 2022. Despite everything that is occurring within our country and our industry and the economy in general, we are still experiencing good loan growth of 10.8% year-over-year as of third quarter end. And it was not that long ago our industry was literally swimming in liquidity, and now it has been disappearing. In terms of credit quality, we literally do not have a single loan past due 30 days in the entire bank, now for the fifth consecutive quarter end. The series of Fed rate hikes has put a squeeze on our margin, and Jane will speak more to that topic later. Now, these circumstances and outcomes are not necessarily unique to West Bank. However, what is unique to West Bank is we believe we are in a much superior position than others to enter an economic slowdown or recession. We believe this protection goes beyond our underwriting and our relationship building, and Harley will speak more about that topic. Another outcome caused by recent events that is perhaps also somewhat unique to West Bank is is that our long history of being a reliable dividend-paying strong community bank makes our current dividend yield of 4.81% as of third quarter end all the more attractive. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chief Risk Officer, Mr. Harley Olofsson.