But you know, I should say, Aaron. I want to be sure here that our brand is and will remain near the early-stage business. So, the greater world of early-stage tech and life sciences remains a big part of our focus but we do believe and we now do have the capacity to be more available, more capable in the later-stage world. I should also say that companies are holding on longer rounds are bigger and so all of that is causing a degree of increased opportunity generally speaking, there’s simply more later-stage opportunity out there.
Q: You should be able to thank businesses further through their life cycle as well.
Operator
Our next question comes from Julianna Balick from KBW. Your line is open, please go ahead.
Q: Good morning. I wanted to follow-up on some of the topics of that have already been raised in Q&A and in your remarks. In terms of the strong loan growth that we saw this quarter, which was most excellent, could you comment as to whether that is just coming. How much of that is market share gains from your competitors and if so which competitors you’re taking market share from? Or how much of that is simply that the market is getting bigger with the rate of new company formation and VC investment so that you know there is more to go around for everyone.
Dough Bowers – President & CEO
Well, a little bit of both, I think would be the best answer. There is a degrees of take-away that goes on with our competition, us from them and them from us. But broadly speaking this has a lot to do with the degree of expanded opportunity and right alongside of that the degree of our expanded reach, brand, feed on the street, all of that is causing that opportunity.
Q: That makes sense. And who are your biggest competitors and especially now as your brand gets bigger and your reach expands, you know, who are you coming up against the most often for loans?
Dough Bowers – President & CEO
Yeah, I mean Julianna you know all these players, there’s nothing really that has changed, Silicon Valley Bank remains, a very very important competitor in this space, NN we certainly deal with, Comerica in a meaningful way, some of the [inaudible] that funds, will compete in this space and then, after that, it’s pretty modest.
Q: Got it. And then jumping real quick to loan yields, your underlying loan yields you remarked decrease nine basis points, how much of that is coming in from competitive pressure on the loan yields in the marketplace versus how much of that is coming from your mix shift as you kind of get into later stage lending.
Pat Oaks – Chief Financials Officer
The later-stage lending is probably not as big an impact as in the fourth quarter a little bit increase in VCS, but we’re seeing overall pressure from whether is early-stage or later-stage throughout the Board of keeping that loan yield up. So, there is some pressure just in general in our business.
Q: Okay, and in terms of thinking about next year, you had said that you’re looking for expense increase in the mid-teens. What is the underlying growth expectation for loans and/or deposits or both that you’ve under that and to what degree, at what level of growth will push your incentive comp up so that we see expense growth higher than mid-teens?
