WEST DES MOINES, Iowa, May 20, 2026, 08:17 CDT
- West Bancorporation’s 25-cent quarterly dividend is payable Wednesday to holders of record as of May 6.
- WTBA was last quoted at $23.30, down 0.2% from the previous close, giving the company a market value near $397 million.
- The bank’s first-quarter profit rose, helped by a wider lending margin, but loans and deposits both slipped from year-end levels.
West Bancorporation enters Wednesday with its regular dividend due for payment, a small but important cash-return marker for a community bank stock whose latest quarter was built less on growth than on cheaper funding.
The parent of West Bank reported first-quarter net income of $10.6 million, or 61 cents a diluted share, up from $7.8 million, or 46 cents, a year earlier. That is why the dividend matters now: investors are testing whether a better spread on money can support the payout while loan demand stays uneven.
The key number was net interest margin — the gap between what a bank earns on loans and securities and what it pays for deposits and other funding. On a tax-equivalent basis, a company-adjusted measure that helps compare taxable and tax-exempt income, West’s margin rose to 2.59% from 2.47% in the fourth quarter and 2.28% a year earlier. Deposit costs fell 14 basis points from the prior quarter; one basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point.
David Nelson, president and chief executive, said the company’s priorities remained focused on “relationship building strategies” to improve profitability and shareholder value. He also said credit quality remained “pristine,” with no loans on nonaccrual status at March 31 — meaning no loans were so troubled that the bank had stopped booking interest income on them. GlobeNewswire
Management’s rate story is not finished. Jane Funk, chief financial officer, told analysts on the earnings call that, if rates and funding costs hold steady, West has “plenty of opportunity on the asset side in repricing to improve margin,” with roughly $250 million of loans and investments expected to reprice over the next 12 months. Investing
Loan growth was the weaker side of the report. Loans outstanding fell by about $10.1 million from Dec. 31 to $2.99 billion at March 31, while deposits dropped $133.5 million, or 3.8%, over the same period. The bank said loan payoffs reflected secondary-market refinancing and asset or business sales, not a broad loss of customer relationships.
Brad Winterbottom, West Bank’s president, told investors the company was backfilling payoffs with “new opportunities at better interest rates,” while also calling deposit gathering “a very competitive market today.” Brad Peters, the Minnesota group president, said recent M&A disruption in those markets could give West targets to pursue, but added the sales cycle would take time. Investing
That competitive context matters. Larger regional peer First Interstate BancSystem also reported a higher first-quarter margin, at 3.41%, while deposits fell. Nicolet Bankshares, which closed its MidWestOne acquisition in February and added scale in the Upper Midwest, reported first-quarter net income of $15 million, hurt by mostly merger-related expenses, while posting $52 million of core net income on a non-GAAP basis.
West is smaller and more local. Its West Bank unit serves small- and medium-sized businesses and consumers through offices in the Des Moines area, Coralville and several Minnesota cities, which leaves it exposed to the same fight for business deposits but without the scale of larger regional lenders.
The broader market tone was firmer before the open, with Wall Street futures higher as chip stocks rebounded ahead of Nvidia results. For WTBA, though, the tape is more old-fashioned: deposit pricing, loan payoffs, commercial credit and the path of interest rates.
But the clean-credit case can change. West said estimated uninsured deposits were about 27% of total deposits at March 31, and its commercial real estate portfolio exceeded regulatory concentration guidelines that call for heightened risk management, though the company said the portfolio stayed within its own policy limits. Its own model showed a 100-basis-point rate increase could cut one-year net interest income by 1.98%, while a 100-basis-point decline could lift it 1.37%, making customer behavior and the rate path a live risk.
For now, the dividend is covered by the last reported quarter: West declared $4.2 million of common dividends in the first quarter against net income of $10.6 million. The harder test is ahead — replacing runoff with higher-yielding loans, without paying too much to keep deposits.
