Steve Hovde established Hovde Groups’ Chicago office in 1988. He serves as the Chairman and CEO of Hovde Group. Mr. Hovde is responsible for overseeing the firm’s strategic growth initiatives, as well as playing a very active role in many of the firm’s key client relationships. In addition, Mr. Hovde plays an integral role in assisting the firm’s clients with their most important business transactions, such as issuing capital or pursuing M&A.

In addition to being an investment banker, Mr. Hovde, with his brother Eric owns a controlling interest in Sunwest Bank, headquartered in Irvine, CA, which has approximately $2.1 billion in assets and $220 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 $2.6 billion asset community bank in the Chicago area and a $2.0 billion asset size publicly traded 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. Prior to that, Mr. Hovde served as an attorney specializing in real estate law with a 200-member law firm based in Chicago, Rudnick & Wolfe, now known as DLA Piper. Before 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, and now Deloitte & Touche LLP.

Mr. Hovde graduated with distinction 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.