Richard Davis, a former latchkey kid from Los Angeles, has been cool as cash as he’s led of one of the most respected banks in the nation through the recession.

Steer the sixth-largest bank in the country through the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression? Check.

Become the ad hoc government-relations point man for the national banking industry? Done.

Plan corporate investments and expansions while your peers are struggling to just stay alive? No problem.

It took being summoned to the White House for an audience with President Barack Obama in March to give the chairman, president, and CEO of U.S. Bancorp pause.

“We lumbered up to the gate and started walking toward the West Wing,” Davis said of approaching the White House with friend John Stumpf, CEO of San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co. “We didn’t want to miss this poignant moment, so we both just stopped in our tracks and said, ‘Let’s face it, this is pretty amazing.’ It was not lost on us how fortunate we were to have a place at the table” during this historic moment.

Davis was in the White House again in mid-December for a meeting with Obama and other bank executives to discuss regulatory reform, lending practices, and executive compensation. Afterwards, he was the face of the banks on national TV news.

Davis, who started his career as a teller more than 30 years ago, has flourished on the national stage during the depths of the economic crisis. Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank, a patchwork of regional banks that was still relatively unknown nationwide up to a decade ago and, more recently, dismissed by some as too conservative for passing on subprime-mortgage lending, has been vindicated as it emerged as one of the strongest and largest banks in the country.

For his stalwart commitment to solid banking principles that helped U.S. Bank avoid the morass of subprime lending, his plans to leverage U.S. Bank’s newfound star status to launch the company further ahead of its competitors, and the easy transformation of this former teller as a national spokesman for the banking industry, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal names Richard Davis its Executive of the Year.

TARP Exit

On the one-year anniversary of U.S. Bank accepting $6.6 billion from the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program in November 2008, Davis showed a visitor a small piece of blue tarpaulin in a wood-and-glass frame. A small plaque noted the dates “Nov. 14, 2008-June 9, 2009”—the period in which the U.S. Treasury owned $6.6 billion in U.S. Bank stock as part of the TARP program. Davis gave all the members of his executive team one of these pieces of "TARP" to memorialize everything they’d gone through together since the financial-services sector started collapsing in fall 2008. U.S. Bank was among the first two banks to completely exit the TARP program out of the nine national banks that originally took it. Its exit demonstrated the strength and stability of the company.

The nation took notice of U.S. Bank—and Richard Davis.

“This isn’t your grandfather’s bank anymore,” said Steve Bartlett, president and CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable in Washington. “U.S. Bank is highly respected, and their success has come from their conservative values. That’s a tribute to Richard’s character.”

Characteristic of Davis, the piece of tarpaulin was a serious gesture laced with humor.