West Bancorporation

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the West Bank Corporation Incorporated Second Quarter Earnings Call. My name is Emily, and I'll be your moderator for today's call. After the prepared remarks, you will have the opportunity to ask any questions by pressing Start, followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. I will now turn the call over to our host, Jane Funk. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the West Bank Corporation Incorporated Second Quarter 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 president. I'll start out reading our fair disclosure statement. During today's conference call, we may make projections or other forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 regarding future events or the future financial performance of the company. We caution that such statements are predictions and that actual results may differ materially. Please see the forward-looking statement disclosure and our 2023 second quarter earnings release for more information about risks and uncertainties which may affect us. The information we will provide today is accurate as of June 30, 2023, and we undertake no duty to update that information. And we'll start off the call with Dave Nelson.

Thank you, Jane. Welcome everyone. And thank you for joining us. We appreciate your interest in our company. I just have a few brief summary statements and then we'll turn the call over to others for more detail. American banker magazine recently came out with their list of the 2022 top performing large community banks between three and 10 billion. and ranked West Bank as number 18 in America. That was for last year. In the meantime, the Federal Reserve has been successful in curtailing growth in our markets, and their monetary policy has also resulted in dramatically increased depository rates, which are squeezing our margin. Our loan growth year to date is about 2%. Our credit quality remains pristine. We declared a second quarter dividend of 25 cents per share payable August 23rd to shareholders of record as of August 9th. I'd now like to turn the call over to our Chief Risk Officer, Harley Olofsson.