Founders hope ongoing meeting of minds yields marketable results. With the leading edge of the baby-boom generation turning 60 this year, the greatest retirement wave ever known has already hit the is beach. For the founders of a new Washington, D.C.-based industry association called the Retirement Income Industry Association (RIIA), that simple fact underlines an urgent need for products and services specifically designed to safeguard boomers' nest-eggs through decades-long retirements.

In other words, says RIIA, mass-market financial planning - long focused on helping reasonably well-off baby boomers accumulate enough wealth to retire in comfort - has to shift gears and start helping retirees turn their wealth into secure retirement-income streams.

Priorities

RIIA was formed a few months ago to help that process along. "Industry leaders must collaborate and innovate to arrive at the solutions needed to meet our nation's income challenge," says Francois Gadenne, RIIA's founding chairman and CEO of Retirement Income Engineering, a Boston-based company that develops retirement-income structures.

RIIA also hopes to help get word of the need for retirement-income planning to the general public, primarily through their advisors and the media. "It's essential that ordinary Americans understand what's really at stake here, which is nothing less than their future financial security," says Gadenne.

Other priorities for RIIA include instituting retirement-income training and certification programs, maintaining a database of retirement-income products and services and lobbying for policies that promote retirement-income solutions.

Jack Sharry, senior v.p. for retirement security at Phoenix, a Hartford, Conn.-based asset manager, says RIIA was born of "a lot of thinking by a lot of firms about the baby-boom generation."

Enough to last

Given the sheer number of boomers out there and the fact that they'll be tipping into retirement for the better part of the next three decades, that's not hard to understand. Boomers account for about a third of the U.S population, and they own about 40% of all U.S. private assets.

And, as a group, boomers are expected to live longer than any previous generation, thanks to higher levels of personal fitness and improving medical care. In 1955 the average retirement age for Americans was 68 and average life expectancy was 72. Now the average retirement age is 62 and average life expectancy has jumped to 80 - more starkly, 65-year-old man has one chance in four of seeing his ninety-second birthday; a 65-year-old woman is as likely to get past age 94.

But in addition to being long-lived, boomer-generation retirees face rising health costs. Out-of-pocket costs beyond Medicare ranging from $125,000 to $300,000, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute- and that's not counting nursing-home stays.

Cards on table

Bob Del Col, CEO of FundQuest, a Boston-based third-party investment-platform provider, says that RIIA could go a long way toward improving the quality of retirement. "We're trying to create an association of thought leaders in this space, and while some firms may feel it's better to keep their cards close to their chests, I think the problem is so large that you're as likely to make a mistake by not networking than by keeping to yourself."

Gadenne says that retirement-income products will probably end up being combinations of traditional investment offerings, specialized accumulation vehicles and insurance products. "What exactly it is will depend on the client," he says.

In addition to Phoenix and FundQuest, RIIA's founding members include AllianceBernstein, Aviva, Bank of America, Genworth, Greenwich Associates, ING, MassMutual, MFS, Morningstar, Nationwide, UBS and Wachovia. -FWR

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