Wachovia CFO's job is a Wurtz case scenario.

• Author: Brown, Kathy
• Position: Tom Wurtz, chief financial officer

Tom Wurtz insists he's "not a terribly exciting person." He's a number cruncher and since February has been Charlotte-based Wachovia Corp.'s chief financial officer, in charge of budgeting, financial reporting, treasury management, taxation and other brain-busting duties at the nation's fourth-largest bank.

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Wachovia promoted him from treasurer to replace Bob Kelly, who resigned to become CEO of Pittsburgh-based Mellon Financial. Banking analyst Nancy Bush of Aiken, S.C.-based NAB Research LLC says Wurtz is "scary smart."

Smart enough to know he had made a mistake on his first career choice--and the second. "Like George Costanza, I always thought it would be fun to say I was an architect." Unlike the Seinfeld character, Wurtz, 44, actually studied to be one--for a year at Kent State University before transferring to West Virginia University to study petroleum engineering. "About halfway through the program, I realized that oil tends to accumulate in some unattractive places." He earned a bachelor's in engineering there in 1984 and an MBA from Arizona State University in 1986.

He worked for the California legislature as a consultant for a state agency similar to the federal Government Accountability Office. Part of his job was researching ways to coordinate federal and state medical-insurance programs. In the late '80s, fascinated by the savings-and-loan crisis, he went to work for the U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision in Thousand Oaks, Calif. After three years, he...