Q: Ok. I know your net charge offs picked up a little bit this quarter. Was there any lumpiness in there or was it just a bunch of smaller losses?
Dough Bowers – President & CEO
For the most part smaller loans, in keeping with the average loan balance, you’re using the word, this lumpiness, this degree of volatility that happens with these kinds of loans that showed through in the first quarter and we obviously had a very good year by comparison.
Q: Can I ask one more follow-up? You said you hired 28 people last year; do you have a sort of goal in mind for hires this year?
Dough Bowers – President & CEO
Well, we do. The numbers are going to move around but it will be approximately that same number of hires for 2015.
Operator
Thank you and our next question comes from Aaron Deer from Sandler O’Neil. The line is open please go ahead.
Q: Maybe just a follow-up on Jennifer’s question with respect to the higher end, amongst that number of folks that you’re looking to hire this year, how would you characterize the split between people that are going to be frontline bankers versus folks that are more back office to kind of support the infrastructure.
Dough Bowers – President & CEO
Closer to 50/50 in terms of the balance. And when we say that, of course, the [inaudible] include the greater risk area which obviously is important for our business.
Q: Sure. And then with the loan growth in the quarter, seems like you had strong growth in life sciences side and the ABL well the technology book looked flat, can you talk about what kind of demand and production decisions were behind those dynamics?
Dough Bowers – President & CEO
There’s a couple of things. One, we had a strategy that we continued to execute on around this degree of tilt to later-stage. So, with the capital raise, with the increase in house limits and with the opportunities we are seeing in the marketplace and most importantly with what we believed to be an approved in credit quality that comes from that later-stage in more improved credit, if you will. We are going to have a degree of tilt, you saw it in ’14 and you’ll continue to see that. [inaudible] was a little bit of a catch-up in terms of activity in the fourth quarter vis-à-vis prior quarter. Some of that certainly having to do with the amount of life science activity that was more equity oriented either private or public in the first half of the year versus debt oriented.
And I would just note in the technology section, you’ve got to be careful of [inaudible] right? Our overall commitments were up, the actual [inaudible] was down a little bit.
Q: With respect to the strategy to move more toward later stage, can you talk about the pricing differential on early stage credits versus later stage?
Dough Bowers – President & CEO
Yeah, it comes in two forms, there is less warrant opportunity traditionally in that arena and you do have a typically a little less in margin. Some of what you make up for all of that is a higher degree if traditional banking activity, being foreign exchange, credit card, and you also have a bigger depositary base opportunity just given the size of the company.
