West Bancorporation

Thank you for standing by. My name is Gail and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the West Bank Corporation Inc. Fourth Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jane Funk, Chief Financial Officer. You may begin.

Good afternoon. I'm Jane Funk, the CFO of West Bank Corporation, Inc., and I'd like to welcome the participants on the call today and thank you for joining us. With me today, I've got Dave Nelson, our CEO, Harley Olofsson, our Chief Risk Officer, and Brad Peters, our Minnesota Group President. Now I will read the 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 in our 2024 fourth quarter earnings release for more information about risks and uncertainties which may affect us. The information we will provide today is accurate as of December 31st, 2024, and we undertake no duty to update the information. And with that, I'll turn it over to Dave Nelson.

Thank you, Jane, and thank you everyone who has dialed in to join us. We appreciate your interest and support of our company. We had an excellent fourth quarter. From an earnings standpoint, it was our best quarter during the previous seven quarters. During 2022, we knew and forecasted that 2023 and 2024 were going to be challenging due to margin compression and they were. We also had forecasted that 2025 would be better and it will. We actually, we believe the 2025 improvement is already underway and reflected within our fourth quarter 2024 performance. We believe our forecasted 2025 improvement was accelerated by our tremendous deposit gathering success during 2024, which then allowed for the corresponding reduction in wholesale deposits. We will continue to benefit from further short-term rate reductions and significant asset repricing opportunities during 2025 and 2026. Our credit quality remains pristine and the economies of the communities in which we do business are strong and our loan and deposit pipelines remain solid. Based upon our fourth quarter performance, we have declared a 25-cent dividend to common shareholders of record as of February 5th and payable February 19th. Those are the extent of my prepared remarks, and I will now turn the call over to our Chief Risk Officer, Mr. Harley Olofsson.