History
Israel Discount Bank, formerly known as Eretz Yisrael Discount Bank or Palestine Discount Bank, was founded on 5 April 1935 by Leon Recanati, a new immigrant from Greece who had been the head of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki. His partners were Moshe Carasso and Yosef Albo. The bank operated in a store at 39 Yehuda Halevi St. in Tel Aviv. It was founded with a focus on foreign trade and with a deliberate Sephardic orientation so as to fill what Recanati perceived as a Sephardic void in the banking industry. Discount was unique in that it was open to private customers, whereas most other banks in Palestine at the time catered to merchants and institutions.
Shortly after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Ottoman Bank, one of five large foreign banks active at the time, was merged into Discount Bank. Discount became Israel's second largest bank in 1952, with over 40 branches throughout the country. It retained that position until the merger of Bank Hapoalim with the credit and saving funds of the Histadrut in 1957. Discount opened its first commercial bank in the United States in 1962 in the form of Israel Discount Bank of New York, or IDB Bank. In 1965 Discount Bank was still described as a "bastion of the veteran Sephardic establishment."
In 1952, the name of the bank was changed to Israel Discount Bank.
Discount began establishing a presence in Florida in the late 1970s, at the time specializing in international banking. In 2002 it expanded its Florida-based operations to encompass domestic banking as well, after taking over part of the Hamilton Bank of Miami, which had been seized and closed by regulators.
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