Meet a neighbor: Jacob Holly is managing risk at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Neighbor Jacob Holly thrives in crisis situations. After all, a man with his resume would have to.

NCAA Division 1 football player. West Point Graduate. Iraq War veteran. And now, at 43 years old, a director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas specializing in business continuity and IT risk management.

Born in St. Louis, Holly grew up moving around the country before settling in McKinney for high school. His family owned land in East Texas, and he remembers most of his childhood outdoors.

He excelled at football in high school and drew attention from schools like Sam Houston State. Holly also had a pretty respectable grade point average and came from a family with a strong military background, which opened another pathway.

“The academies came online because the grades and everything was probably a better path, but my dad was probably inching me a little,” Holly laughs. “I went there, did recruiting trips, did a couple other visits. I liked the whole history piece.”

After being offered a spot on the United States Military Academy football team, he enrolled at the U.S. Military Preparatory School in New Jersey for a year before entering West Point, a common path for Army football players.

When he arrived at West Point for his first year, traditionally dubbed “plebe year” by cadets, he says it wasn’t the easiest transition.

“When you go there, it’s like, ‘This is not fun,’ but the football part is great. It’s obviously tough,” he says. “It’s hard because I was a good student, had good grades, just not Ivy League level. There’s some guys that are just geniuses, almost right Rhodes scholars.”

The West Point team failed to win a single game that season, finishing 0-13 with a 34–6 loss to Navy.

“It is kind of that thing. You just keep trying to keep persevering. Sometimes success doesn’t come right then, but it does come later on,” he says. “You just get better and build the foundation for something.”

Holly was commissioned as an Army operations officer after graduating from the Academy and was deployed to Iraq, where he served two tours. As operations were winding down in 2009, he took the chance to serve on transition teams created to train Iraqi forces.

“Especially in those Military or Army units, you’re getting all walks of life, different perspectives, like a football team,” he says. “Again, you build that cohesive group because you are geared towards one mission. You have to do these things. If you don’t do them, people get hurt, and then people don’t succeed.”

After transitioning out of the military, Holly used connections to land a job at Bank of America, where he worked as a business continuity analyst. He also attained master’s degrees from the University of Oklahoma and Texas A&M University.

Holly is now at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, which oversees Texas, northern Louisiana and southern New Mexico. In his role as director, he manages crises for the bank to minimize business impact, such as the 2021 winter storm.

“It was, No. 1, make sure we’re trying to help out people the best we can getting communications out because a lot of times if the internet goes down, there’s not much you can do,” he says. “But what we did there made sure our core functions are ready to go. Their staff has people there taking care of their particular families on site.”

Holly says those crises are where he’s most comfortable.

“I personally find it enjoyable, kind of dealing with that chaos, but it’s also making sure people are OK on the family side,” Holly says. “Tactically, I can’t have you be a good worker, working for the company, if you can’t deal with your home life.”

He says he wants his future, career-wise, to still center around crisis management, but with an increasingly tech-forward focus.

Outside of work, Holly is married to his wife Elizabeth for a decade. The pair met at Capitol Pub in Uptown. Jacob had a difficult time putting her number in his phone, he says, as she had written it upside down on his forearm.

The two got engaged in France as a surprise.

“He said, ‘Pack two suitcases, one with cold weather and then one with hot weather,’” Elizabeth says. “And then we got to the airport, and he was like, ‘We’re going to Paris.’ And so we flew to Paris. He had already called and arranged time off for me from my boss and everything like that. And so we went to Paris, and we took a train out to Reims in Champagne.”

These days, the two have an 8-year-old son and live near the L Streets. They have some land in Ranger, Texas, and enjoy spending time at their son’s sporting events.

Elizabeth says she can always count on her husband in a pinch.

“He’s just amazing. You could always count on him,” she says. “He’s very dependable. He’s wonderful in crisis situations like that’s what he does for his job. He’s always calm, cool and collected.”