Question and Answer Session
Operator
We will now begin the Question and Answer session. And our first question comes from Matthew Clark from Sterne Agee. Please go ahead with your question.
Matthew Clark, Sterne Agee
Hey good morning guys.
Kent Smith, EVP, CFO, Corporate Secretary and Treasurer
Good morning Matthew.
Matthew Clark, Sterne Agee
Maybe first if we could just talk through the margin going forward and what we have seen happened to the curve, it’s good to see you guys have put on new production still above five, I think that’s origination is down 10 basis points, portfolio is still around 526 so that relative gap is not too wide, but just wanted to get an update on what you might be seeing here year-to-date on pricing.
Steve Gardner, President and CEO
I think that our goal here is obviously to maintain it at the level we saw in the fourth quarter. I think as we all know, competition for loans is very fierce, but that has been the case here for the last couple of years and we have maintained our discipline in pricing and we are going to continue that approach going forward. From the funding side, we obviously saw the full impact of the sub debt and then the FHLB borrowings that we fixed towards the latter part of the third quarter and that had the biggest impact on the margin. Going forward, we don’t see anything else on the horizon that should impact our funding cost anywhere near that level. And as we mentioned, we had very nice inflows on the deposit accounts in the fourth quarter.
Matthew Clark, Sterne Agee
Okay, great. With the acquisition closing next week, can you just remind us of what, if any, purchase accounting benefits that might come through the margin? Or do you think their pro forma margin will be somewhat comparable to where we are today?
Steve Gardner, President and CEO
We think that the pro forma margin will be pretty fairly comparable. Independence has fairly clean asset quality. The marks are not substantial there and so any impact on the margin will be pretty de minimis.
Matthew Clark, Sterne Agee
Okay and on the gain on sale lines, can you help us think about the pipeline here going forward and your ability to sustain that level of production of premium?
Steve Gardner, President and CEO
As I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we expect to see some of that that typical seasonality that we’ve seen in the last couple of years in our production in the first quarter of 2015, although heading into this year, our pipeline is quite a bit stronger than it has been in the last couple of years, so we’re encouraged from that standpoint. I also mentioned that we added some loan officers in the SBA side, although those folks came on in the mid to latter part of the fourth quarter, and by the time they get everything closed out in their old pipeline and start to originate loans we don’t think we’ll see an impact from those folks until most likely the second quarter of this year. But overall we expect to continue to grow the SBA line of business and we would expect to gain on sale to benefit that as we move through 2015.
Matthew Clark, Sterne Agee
Okay, I understand that. Thank you.
