Before founding Progress Financial, Gabriel was Senior Vice President, National Hispanic Segment Executive at Bank of America in Charlotte, NC. He was responsible for developing and overseeing the execution of the company’s Hispanic marketing, sales and retention strategies across all the consumer product groups, which included Deposits (checking and savings), Card Services (credit and debit), e-Commerce, Remittances, Insurance, and Consumer Real Estate. As overall segment leader he also drove national Hispanic employee hiring strategies across the 6,000+ retail branch network, as well as product development, service and fulfillment, and other initiatives that impacted the bank’s Hispanic consumer market acquisition. He was directly responsible for setting and overseeing the bank’s Hispanic consumer account sales and retention goals, with over $30m in annual marketing investing, as well as additional ongoing related technology and research spending. Hispanic customer acquisition at Bank of America grew 5-fold during Gabriel’s tenure as segment leader.

Gabriel was also actively involved with the Bank’s efforts at promoting financial services access to all sectors of the population. He testified before the U.S. Congress on behalf of the Bank on the subject of helping bring financial services to the unbanked and underserved communities.

Before joining Bank of America in early 2003, he was founding managing director for RedLatino, Inc., a Hispanic-focused subsidiary of Redf, one of the largest marketing services and marketing strategy firms in the southeastern United States. There, he helped financial services clients develop and execute key Hispanic marketing strategies for checking, debit cards, money remittances and mortgages.

In 1995 Gabriel founded and managed Cendant’s Latin American operations, which he subsequently sold to a marketing firm in Mexico City. Gabriel began his career in the early 1990s as a consultant for McKinsey & Company, Inc., serving clients in Mexico and India.

Gabriel is a Board Member of Club Arca, a CA-based successful venture targeting the Hispanic consumer in the US with a value-added membership program.
Gabriel received a master’s degree in business administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a bachelor’s degree in business from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in Mexico City. He was a founding member and president of ITAM Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs as well as president of the Mexico City chapter of the Stanford MBA alumni association.

He enjoys Southeast Asian cooking, traveling, snow skiing, water skiing and scuba diving.