Pro-Consumer

“Over the last 30 years, variable annuities switched from focusing on helping people save tax-deferred, and then annuitize an income stream, to a vehicle that lost sight of the tax-deferral component and was all about the rider,” Greenberg says. “We believe that if you can provide tax deferral, you’re providing a super-charged way of saving for retirement.”

And the way to make that possible was to create a low-cost, value-added VA. Largely responsible are the firm’s efficient, large-scale technology platform and fully automated processing system.
“People were trying to crack the fee-based advisor market for a long time, but with limited success,” Greenberg says. “We felt we had a product that really made sense and would be able to reach them and grow. We look at fee-based advisors as super-consumers, trying to realize the best value and grow their clients’ assets.”

Greenberg would never have made his career building businesses had he continued to let his natural academic bent dominate.

After earning a BA in economics from The Johns Hopkins University in 1984, he worked as a research analyst at the Federal Reserve. Then he moved to The Restaurant Association, also in Washington, D.C., where he was a food-industry analyst.

It was his next job, building publications — on the operations and marketing side — at CapitalCities/ABC, in New York, where this journalist’s son got a taste for doing business.

And would, accordingly, change the way he presented himself. “I was more of an introverted, analytic person. But to have a broader business career, I became more extroverted. You have to know your limitations and work on them,” he says.

In 1993, he joined Smilow to oversee marketing and operations at the fledgling Virginia-based TeleBank. There, Greenberg took the biggest risk of his career: to bring a relatively small bank onto the national stage — with no brick-and-mortar branches but serving clients instead via telephone and, later, the Internet. The move required a huge ramp-up of marketing and advertising dollars.

To be sure, it was a leap of faith. “People would say, ‘That’s crazy. Nobody is going to conduct business with a financial company when it’s not face to face,” he recalls.

But TeleBank’s reduced operating costs were passed on to consumers in lower fees and higher account rates. By 1998, it had more than 50,000 accounts. Two years later E*Trade Financial bought it.

Greenberg stayed for a bit, then, with Lau, opened a management consulting firm to help develop banks. In 2002, he joined Merrill Lynch as a marketing vice president, soon introducing the firm’s Beyond Banking service.

But at the big wirehouse, Greenberg confirmed to himself that, at heart, he was an entrepreneur. And when Smilow, who had gone to Jefferson, asked him to help take the carrier to the next level, it was an offer he could hardly refuse.

“I went back to a small company to try to create a new path in the industry. That’s the most enjoyable for me,” Greenberg says. “Having so much control over your destiny is such a rich experience. There’s nothing that equals it.”