The affable, indefatigable, endlessly curious Tom Scrivener ’93

by Shelly Leachman

For a high schooler growing up in Philadelphia, applying to Penn State when it comes time for college is almost a rite of passage, if not an unwritten rule of sorts. But what if you’ve had a lifelong curiosity about California?

If you’re Tom Scrivener ’93, you also apply to UC Berkeley, “because it just seemed like a cool place and super fun,” he recalls thinking at the time. He didn’t get in.

And that’s what you call kismet.

“But then came this acceptance to UC Santa Barbara,” he says. “I had never been there; I couldn’t have picked Santa Barbara out on a map. But they also sent a color photo of the campus surrounded by ocean on three sides and it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen in my life. Immediately it was, ‘I’ve got to go there.’ I was all in.”

All in, indeed.

With a voracious appetite for experience, Scrivener dove headfirst into academics, activities and the campus community and culture — and he didn’t come up for air for four years.

Two weeks into his freshman year, he’d been elected president of his residence hall, he’d taken up beach volleyball and he was getting a crash course in the California lifestyle and lingo. By week three, he’d taken a job mopping floors at Ortega Dining Commons. That was a game changer.

“My parents paid for my first year of college, but I had to pay for years two, three and four,” he says. “So for me, a lot of my experience at UCSB was about how I was going to make enough money to be able to stay there. That was a tremendous motivator and drove me to do some really cool stuff.”

Scrivener arrived on campus with pre-existing aspirations of pursuing business; his financial reality pushed him to advance on that plan sooner rather than later.

At Ortega — where he remembers thinking to himself, “I am going to crush this mopping job; I’ll be the best ever” — he was soon promoted to a serving position on the line, then promoted again to the kitchen staff. By his junior year, he was the student manager, a role he held until he graduated.

“It was the best job ever — money and free food,” he jokes. “But more so it gave me the absolute clarity that if you just roll up your sleeves and dive into whatever the job is, you will find success somehow. That experience completely validated for me that hard work, getting it done — that’s what it’s about. I carried that right into my job at Deloitte and it worked. And I’ve carried it throughout my career.”

Majoring in business economics, Scrivener was drawn to accounting and finance. He’s still grateful for the practical knowhow he learned in his courses, including — in the pre-email days before LinkedIn and all the rest — how to craft a résumé. He credits his two years as a teaching assistant in accounting for giving him the gift of “crisp communication.”

“That ability to crisply and quickly explain something to somebody is just a beautiful skill, and absolutely that came from my experience as a TA,” he says. “I’m convinced that my success through the years was all sort of driven by my ability to communicate and to explain things to people, which is so important.”

Fresh off his graduation, Scrivener scored an accounting job at Deloitte, where he said his only request was to be assigned to “whatever’s super hard and super interesting.” He began working with mortgage companies, becoming an expert in mortgage finance and, specifically, in “off-balance sheet transactions.” Eventually he was sent to Seattle to work with Microsoft. Then came the call that would change his career.

Deloitte was hired by Enron in the wake of its whistleblower accusations. Scrivener was summoned from Seattle to help. The opportunity raised his professional profile. It also led to a prominent interview in Forbes magazine that provided another boost. Scrivener’s job prospects bloomed beyond all expectation. He became CFO of an insurance company, Balboa, which was eventually acquired by Bank of America.

Now fast-forward 15 years or so, past an array of finance jobs within BofA. Today, Scrivener is the chief operating executive of Bank of America. And yes, that would be all of Bank of America — overseeing operations and 30,000 people worldwide. His team is responsible for managing all critical processes and platforms for clients from deposits to payment products, to sales and trading, among others to name just a few.

“It’s the coolest job in the world because of how much I get to learn,” he says. “I’ve got 400 different processes. I get to go through all of them and try to continue to become an expert on as many of them as I can. It’s the most fun job I’ve ever had.”

“I had sort of pigeonholed myself as being a finance person because I had been an accountant, and then they moved me into operations, which is really assembly lines and process efficiency,” Scrivener says. “If you think about my time at UCSB — Ortega, the care packages, the fishery — all of those experiences were more operations. I’ve sort of discovered a new career in a way, even though it happens to be at the same company.”

A new career, maybe, but it was Scrivener’s array of experiences at UCSB, he says, that paved the way for all that came after.

“The power of intellectual curiosity and trying something different, the importance of clear communication, that mindset to just get it done — and to do it as well as you can — these are my top three keys to success,” he says. “And I learned all of that in my time at UC Santa Barbara.”