Skip Hove, former FDIC acting chairman and Nebraska banker, dies at 84

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Andrew “Skip” Hove, a longtime Nebraska banker who served as acting chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on three separate occasions, has died at age 84.

Hove entered banking at Minden Exchange Bank & Trust in Minden, Neb., where he worked for 30 years and became chairman and CEO. He followed his father, Andrew Hove Sr., who led the institution for 60 years.

Hove transitioned from a single-office, agriculture-focused community bank in the Great Plains to Washington in 1990, when he was named the FDIC’s vice chairman. Nebraska bankers had lobbied the agency to add a community banker to its newly expanded board, and President George H.W. Bush nominated Hove, according to the Omaha World-Herald.

He spent 11 years on the board, a time of struggle both in the banking industry and the U.S. economy. Hove was called on to serve as acting chairman three times — in October 1991; between August 1992 and October 1994; and again from June 1997 to May 1998.

Some of those years overlapped with the recession of the early 1990s and the latter stages of the banking and savings and loan crises; more than 1,600 FDIC-insured institutions failed from 1980 to 1994, according to the agency. Hove helped the FDIC bring the then Bank Insurance Fund back to a positive balance in 1993, after two years of deficits, according to the Lincoln Journal-Star.

“During those years, Skip served as Acting Chairman three times and he ably guided the [FDIC] through some of the more difficult times it has faced,” former FDIC Chairman Donna Tanoue said in a letter in the agency’s 2000 annual report.

Hove held many other roles throughout the banking industry during his career. He was chairman of the $13 billion-asset Great Western Bancorp in Sioux Falls, S.D., from 2015 to 2017. He was hired as a consultant in 2009 at the Washington firm Promontory Financial Group. And Hove was a director of Sovereign Bank, the former name of Santander Bank, between 2001 and 2009.

He also passed on his interest in banking to his son, Chris Hove, who is CEO of the $147 million-asset Nebraska Bank of Commerce in Lincoln.

Skip Hove enjoyed "the trust and the respect and the honor you get for helping people with those types of things," Chris Hove told the Omaha World-Herald.

Current FDIC Chairman Jelena McWilliams paid tribute to Hove at an FDIC board meeting on Tuesday. “He was admired as a man of integrity, honesty, wisdom, kindness, modesty and generosity,” McWilliams said. “He was a public servant in the truest sense of the word.”