West Bancorporation

Good afternoon and thank you for standing by. My name is John and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the West Bank Corp Inc. Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed and muted 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. To withdraw your question, simply press star one again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jane Funk. Please, go ahead.

Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. I'm Jane Funk, the CFO at West Bank Corporation. I'd like to welcome the participants on our call today and thank you for joining us. With me today are Dave Nelson, our CEO, Harley Oleson, Chief Risk Officer, Brad Peters, Minnesota Group President, and Todd Mather, West Bank's Chief Credit Officer. I'll read our first order 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 disclosures in our 2025 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, 2025, and we undertake no duty to update the information. With that, I'll turn the call over to Dave Nelson for his remarks.

Thank you, Jane. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and thank you for your interest in our company. West Bank had another solid quarter, which was significantly better than the second quarter of last year. First half earnings this year are about 54% higher than last year's earnings. Our journey back to top performing metrics is continuing as forecasted. Our focus has been on relationship building and deposit growth. We still have a fair amount of asset repricing to benefit from this year and also during 2026, which will continue to improve our margin in earnings. We are gaining new relationships in all our markets and continue to have very strong asset quality. We have declared a $0.25 per share dividend payable August 20th to shareholders of record as of August 6th. Our stock is currently providing a yield in excess of 5%. Those are the end of my prepared remarks, but I will now turn the call over to our Chief Risk Officer, Mr. Harley Oleson.