Leonard Abess (born 1948) is an American banker and businessman and former owner of the

City National Bank of Florida City National Bank of Florida (CNBFL), based in Miami, Florida, is the second-largest financial institution in the state with over $26 billion in assets. CNBFL has 30 branches, from Miami-Dade County to the greater Orlando area, and nearly 1,000 e ...

, the second largest financial institution in the

Florida Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...

with over $22 billion in assets as of 2018. CNBFL has 32 branches, from Miami-Dade County to the greater Orlando area, and nearly 1,000 employees.

Early life and education

Abess' father, Leonard Abess Sr., was the son of

Romanian Jewish The history of the Jews in Romania concerns the Jews both of Romania and of Romanian origins, from their first mention on what is present-day Romanian territory. Minimal until the 18th century, the size of the Jewish population increased after ...

parents who moved from

Providence, Rhode Island Providence is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. One of the oldest cities in New England, it was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, a Reformed Baptist theologian and religious exile from the Massachusetts Bay ...

, to

Miami Miami ( ), officially the City of Miami, known as "the 305", "The Magic City", and "Gateway to the Americas", is a East Coast of the United States, coastal metropolis and the County seat, county seat of Miami-Dade County, Florida, Miami-Dade C ...

to work as an independent auditor at the

First National Bank of Florida The First National Bank of Florida is a bank headquartered in Milton, Florida, with branches in Pensacola, Pace, Navarre and Destin. It is not to be confused with the First National Bank of Miami which became Southeast Banking Corporation Sou ...

. His mother, Bertha (née Ungar), was the daughter of Arthur Ungar, a Miami automobile dealer and a founder of the Temple Israel of Greater Miami. In 1946, Abess's father co-founded (with Baron de Hirsch Meyer) the

, one of the first postwar banks in the region. In 1949, after local hospitals refused to hire Jewish doctors, Leonard Sr. and other Jewish residents of South Florida, pooled their resources and founded the

Mount Sinai Medical Center Mount Sinai Hospital, formerly at times known as Mount Sinai Medical Center, is a 319-bed major urban hospital in Chicago, Illinois, with its main campus located adjacent to Douglass Park at 15th Street and California Avenue on the city's West Si ...

Miami Beach Miami Beach is a coastal resort city in Miami-Dade County, Florida. It was incorporated on March 26, 1915. The municipality is located on natural and man-made barrier islands between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay, the latter of which sep ...

. Abess Jr. graduated from

The Wharton School The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania ( ; also known as Wharton Business School, the Wharton School, Penn Wharton, and Wharton) is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, a private Ivy League research university in P ...

of the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

. He started his career at the bank in its print shop.

Career

Abess became majority owner and chairman of the City National Bank in 1984. The bank had $400 million in assets when he purchased it, which had grown to $2.75 billion at the time of its sale in 2008. In November 2008, Abess sold his 83 percent share of the bank to the

Caja Madrid Caja Madrid, formally the Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad de Madrid, headquartered in Madrid,Inicio
." C ...

banking group for $927 million and shared $60 million of the proceeds with 399 current staff members and 72 former employees. On February 24, 2009, President

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...

praised Abess in his State of the Union Address and invited Abess and another bank employee to be his guest at the speech. Abess was later recognized as one of ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

'' magazine's "Time 100" in 2009. Leonard Abess is a former director of the Miami Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank.

Philanthropy

Abess serves as a

University of Miami The University of Miami (UM, UMiami, Miami, U of M, and The U) is a private research university in Coral Gables, Florida. , the university enrolled 19,096 students in 12 colleges and schools across nearly 350 academic majors and programs, incl ...

trustee and, in 2006, donated $5 million to establish the University of Miami's Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy. Abess and his wife also founded a floating research station in the

Brazilian Amazon Brazilian commonly refers to: * Something of, from or relating to Brazil * Brazilian Portuguese, the dialect of the Portuguese language used mostly in Brazil * Brazilians, the people (citizens) of Brazil, or of Brazilian descent Brazilian may also ...

and the Abess Center for Environmental Studies at

Miami Country Day School Miami Country Day School (MCDS) is a private, non-denominational, co-ed Preschool–12 college preparatory school in unincorporated Miami-Dade County, near Miami Shores, just north of the city of Miami. The school has been named a Blue Ribbon Sch ...

. In 2007, the Miami Chamber of Commerce honored Abess and his wife Jayne with their "Sand in My Shoes Award." In 2006, the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce gave him its "Doc Baker Lifetime Achievement Award." From 2011 until 2014, Abess served as chairman of the University of Miami's board of trustees.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Abess, Leonard L. 1948 births Living people American bankers American people of Romanian-Jewish descent Businesspeople from Florida Jewish American philanthropists University of Miami people Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania alumni 21st-century American Jews