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June 01, 2007 at 04:00 AM
Steve Zaleznick has funneled his years of expertise as head of AARP’s financial services company to create a niche service for baby boomers and seniors that offers a full array of services and financial planning for their retirement years. He first put several building blocks into place, buying a quote service and other companies in the past couple of years to create Washington-based Longevity Alliance, which is designed to provide middle market investors selections from an array of financial and health products geared toward seniors. The “big issue is not the availability of products, but the availability of tools” to help people select those products, Zaleznick says. Older boomers and retirees, he adds, “are on their own in making choices, and my feeling was the time was right to help people navigate those choices.”
In 1999, Zaleznick founded and became the first CEO of AARP Services, Inc., a taxable subsidiary of AARP, which develops and manages a range of financial service and healthcare products for seniors. He began at AARP as a pension, tax, and age discrimination lobbyist, created an in-house legal office, and then served as general counsel of the heavyweight lobbying association for older Americans.
Now, at age 52, Zaleznick, as CEO and president of Longevity Alliance, has just put the finishing touches on a company whose mission is to find the best products from health insurance to annuities to long term care insurance from an open platform. Zaleznick negotiates the contracts with providers and sets the business terms, skills that were in full play when he led AARP Services.
What makes Longevity Alliance, which incorporated in September 2005, able to access an array of high quality choices while providing a needed service?
First, it acquired Iquote around the time of Longevity’s incorporation. IQuote helps search for the best term life insurance rate available. A larger piece came a year later with the acquisition of Long-Term Care Quote in September 2006, which includes the industry giants among its offerings. These acquisitions bequeathed to Longevity Alliance a group of dedicated employees who work out of Gilbert, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. Then, last spring, Longevity Alliance bought Momentum, a small publisher offering guidance-oriented monthly newsletters addressing financial, healthcare, and lifestyle issues facing boomers and retirees.
