Bio

As Chairman and CEO of Hovde Group, Mr. Hovde is responsible for managing its investment banking activities, the strategic development of mergers and acquisitions of bank and thrift institutions, and its private equity activities. In this role, he has negotiated transactions in excess of several billion dollars in deal value and provides the firm's investment bankers with technical and strategic advice on client transactions. Mr. Hovde is also involved in the firm's capital markets business, including placements of equity and trust preferred securities, and the conversion to stock form of mutual thrift institutions. In addition to being an investment banker, Mr. Hovde with his brother Eric, own controlling interests in several banks throughout the United States. These include Sunwest Bank, headquartered in Irvine, CA, which has approximately $938 million in assets and $112 million in equity, and also Bay Bancorp in the Baltimore area, which has approximately $491 million in assets and $68 million in equity. As bankers, they see all the issues that management and board members of banks wrestle with daily. Mr. Hovde is also on the board of directors of a $1.7 billion-asset community bank in the Chicago area and a $650 million asset bank in the Seattle area. He also serves as a trustee of several charitable foundations. Before co-founding Hovde in 1987, Mr. Hovde was Regional General Counsel and Vice President of a national commercial real estate development firm, Vantage Companies. Previous to that, Mr. Hovde served as an attorney with a 200-member law firm based in Chicago, Rudnick & Wolfe, which is today DLA Piper, specializing in real estate law. Prior to that, Mr. Hovde practiced accounting in Chicago as a Certified Public Accountant with one of the former “Big Eight” public accounting firms, Touche Ross LLP, which is today Deloitte & Touche LLP. Mr. Hovde graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Business Administration, majoring in Accounting, from the School of Business at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He also earned his law degree, cum laude, at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois.