Davis looks every bit the stereotypical "banker in the dark blue suit": middle-aged, white, glasses, U.S. Bank pin on his lapel. But when the man opens his mouth, he’s startlingly charismatic.

“What they mean is, ‘You were so much less worse than I thought you’d be,’” Davis said of people’s surprise at his ability to talk banking like he’s your buddy explaining esoteric football facts.

Davis is visibly comfortable walking into every situation and talking to anyone who crosses his path—character traits that have carried him far in his career.

Unusual Upbringing

Davis credits his “weird” upbringing for finding himself at ease in any setting. His parents, Neva and Delmer Davis, were farmers who moved from Iowa to Hollywood in the early 1950s, pulled along Highway 66 by the promise of a more glamorous life. Davis’ sister, Patricia, was born in 1955, he in 1958. His family traveled back to Iowa regularly to visit family, so although Davis is a native of Southern California, the Midwest also is a home of sorts.

“The Midwest was never that foreign to me. It was that place I went to visit that was fairly boring,” Davis said, laughing.

Davis’ father was a truck driver and was away for much of his childhood. His mother, a school secretary, was the stage mother for Davis’ sister, who was a child actress in Hollywood. With his mother focused on her daughter and his father often absent, Davis quietly excelled in academics, music, and sports. He skipped third grade and graduated at the top of his high-school class of 450 students.

Although he received full scholarships to a couple of colleges, including UCLA, Davis opted to enter the U.S. Air Force Academy. He was scheduled to begin classes July 4, 1975—the year the academy started accepting females. A few months before Davis was to start at the academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, he received notice that he was among 17 percent of the incoming class whose spot was deferred for a year to make way for new women. Since he already had turned down his scholarships, he had no choice but to go to work; his Air Force aspirations permanently over.

“My life came to a crashing end. I had no money, no scholarships,” said Davis, whose middle-class family had no funds for his college education. “That’s the end of the story. I went to work.”

Davis describes banking as an “accidental occupation,” one that people don’t typically aspire to, but if they happen into it, they find they like it. Davis knows what he’s talking about. He became a bank teller because it was a Monday-through-Friday job that left his evenings free for night school and his weekends open for studying.

Unlike many of his contemporary peers in the upper echelons of the country’s largest companies, Davis doesn’t have a neat little four-year degree with an MBA tacked on for good measure. He spent eight years going to night school at California State University-Fullerton to get a bachelor’s degree in economics while working full-time at the bank. During that period, he also got married and had two of his three children.

“It was a character builder,” Davis said of his early career. “Now, when someone says we have to work late, I’m like, ‘And I get to go home afterward? I don’t have to go to class?’”

Government Relations

Over the past year, there’s been a lot of working late for Davis, who became CEO of the company in 2006, after serving as president and chief operating officer under former chairman Jerry Grundhofer since 2004. In addition to his CEO duties, Davis has flown regularly to Washington to field questions from members of Congress, the president, and regulators about what exactly went wrong with the banking industry.