Raj Singh, Chief Operating Officer
Thanks John. I’ll repeat a lot of what John has said in terms of deposit growth. Deposit growth was consistent with the last few quarters. $678 million of which about $177 million was DDA and the rest, most of it was MMDA and savings. We had almost no growth in time deposits this quarter. Loan deposit ratio is now at 92%. It’s inching up as we had designed it to and we will keep growing this further up. We expect 2015 also to have loan growth to be a little higher than deposit growth, which will get our loan to deposit ratio to drift upwards. DDA now stands at 27%, money markets and savings at 43% and time deposits at 30%. So the mix of deposits, while it will change ever so slightly is not going to change by leaps and bounds from here on. The cost of funds, excluding hedge accounting costs and accretion cost is 56 basis points, it’s fairly stable. It’s been right around there for the last several quarters and we expect it to hover in that neighborhood through 2015. We do use FHLB as another source of funding as you’ve seen this quarter and we’ll continue to use it. We have plenty of capacity over there that will be our plug as we grow the balance sheet further.
On the M&A landscape, I’m sure there’ll be questions and I’ll just leave it for that. There’s nothing in terms of a deal that is in the pipeline to talk about, but the M&A environment stays fairly active, dialogues stay active, which is an encouraging sign. Most encouraging is to see deals actually getting announced like the one that was announced this morning. But nothing imminent from our perspective we just keep talking to a number of people. I’ll turn it over to Leslie.
Leslie Lunak, Chief Financial Officer
Good morning everybody. Thanks Raj. Just to give you a quick recap of the quarterly results and a little bit more color on some of our expectations for 2015. We saw net interest income stay pretty flat this quarter to what it was last quarter in spite of the declining impact of sales from the zero carrying value pool. And we should see a good increase over the comparable period of the prior year. We should see that number probably stay flat for a quarter and then we’ll see a significant upward trajectory there. This quarter we hit what we think of as a milestone. Total interest income from new loans for the quarter is now in excess of interest income generated by the covered loan portfolio. That’s an inflection point we’ve been expecting and waiting for and we finally reached that inflection point. Pressure on NIM continues due to the run off of the covered assets. We ended the year with NIM of 4.26%. We had given you guidance of between 4% and 4.25% in the quarter so we were right there. For next year I would say we are probably looking at NIM for the year somewhere between 3.8% and 4%. It will continue to decline but at a much slower rate of decline than we’ve seen over recent quarters.
Provision for the quarter as John said, just to echo on his comments, we see a higher provision. Our provisioning is related largely to the growth of the loan portfolio, keeping pace with that growth. And we see the impact of that as John said, provisioning conservatively in the fourth quarter. I want to emphasize we are seeing no deterioration whatsoever. You can see from our statistics and our asset quality, or no indication of that. In line with our previous guidance to you, core non-interest expense, excluding the amortization of the indemnification asset increased about 9% for 2014. I think we had guided you to around 10%. I would say for 2015, those increases will moderate still being in the single-digits, probably a little bit more moderate increase than we saw this year.
