West Bancorporation

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today's West Bank Corporation fourth quarter 2022 earnings call. My name is Megan and I'll be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted in the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Jane Funk with West Bank Corporation. Jane, please go ahead.

Thank you. I'm Jane Funk. I'm the CFO of West Bank and West Bank Corporation. Just want to welcome everybody to our fourth quarter and year-end 2022 earnings call. Today I've got with me Dave Nelson, our CEO and President, Harley Oleson, Chief Risk Officer, Brad Winterbottom, President of West Bank, and Brad Peters, our Minnesota Group President. I'll start out 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 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 such statements to reflect current events or circumstances after this call or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. And we'll go ahead and kick off the comments. We'll start with Dave Nelson.

Thank you, Jane, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us, and thank you for your interest in our company. I have just some general comments, and then we'll turn it over to others for more details. During 2022, West Bank had the second strongest earnings year in our 130-year history. During 2022, we fell a little short of our 21 earnings, but I'd like to point out that our 22 earnings were about 47% higher than what they were during 2020, and 2020 was also a record year. During this past year, we experienced growth in all of our markets, which resulted in net loan growth of about 11.7% on the year, and our credit quality remains very good at year-end 12-31-22, and also end of the fourth quarter represented the sixth consecutive quarter where we did not have a single loan past due 30 days. The Fed rate hikes have put pressure on our margin, and Jane will speak more on that topic. But based upon our fourth quarter performance, our board of directors declared a quarterly dividend of 25 cents per common share. The dividend is payable on February 22nd of 2023 to stockholders of record as of February 8th. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to our Chief Risk Officer, Mr. Harley Olofsson.