Afternoon, everyone. Thanks for being here. I'm Ben Budish. I cover the U.S. brokers, asset managers, and exchanges. With us for this afternoon session from Apollo Global Management, Martin Kelly, CFO. Martin, thanks so much for being here.
Ben, thanks for hosting. Pleasure.
You bet. You guys reported earnings last week. Definitely want to talk about that a little bit, but maybe just to start out, you know, can you talk about what you're seeing in the environment in the wake of some of the recent tariff announcements? You know, how's the change in the macro outlook impacting credit performance, demand to borrow, allocations from LPs, retail buyers, and the broader investment-grade private credit strategy?
Yeah.
It's a lot in there.
It's a complicated question.
What are you seeing?
It's actually a really interesting environment because it's hard to connect all the pieces. I think, you know, macro-wise, markets have obviously stabilized a bit from where they were in March. You see that in spreads and equity markets and the VIX. You know, spreads were literally at all-time tights in most asset classes, in most ratings of most asset classes in most of the first quarter. Spreads, generally speaking, are about halfway back, halfway between where they gapped out to and where they were in the first quarter. The credit markets, and that's, you know, call that like the 20th percentile, more or less, relative to history. The credit markets are not indicating much sign of stress. The agencies have downgraded about 20 companies, which are most exposed to tariffs in the last week or two.
The business that we're seeing is really quite attractive. The underlying need for what we do in providing capital is creating some really interesting opportunities. If we look at the pipelines today, they are as rich, I think, as they've ever been. It really is broad from our equity business all the way down to investment-grade credit, including our syndication business. There have been some puts and takes in there, things that we thought may materialize or pushed off a bit, but others have materialized in the context of the environment. The business is really strong. The fundamentals of the business and the strategy are not really affected by this. It is hard to connect the concern in the market and the uncertainty about the magnitude and duration of tariffs with the credit markets.
That's the more difficult part to work through. It's pretty constructive and flows across institutional channels, wealth channels are in line, and our capital solutions business. Obviously, Athene had a very strong first quarter in terms of top-line flows. The business is well positioned, notwithstanding the fact that there's, I think, a lot of uncertainty ahead of us.
Got it. Maybe now circling back to kind of results from last week, you know, environment, quite dynamic. You're in the retirement services segment. You've got a long history of kind of navigating these kinds of environments through different periods. You know, what are the kind of headwinds you're seeing right now that resulted in your full-year SRE guidance revision? Does this alter the strategy in any way going forward? What's kind of your outlook for spreads, specifically within that business? You know, how does this impact your longer-term kind of financial targets? Unpack what's going on there.
Yeah. We provided guidance of 10% growth over time over a five-year period last October. The strategy is unchanged. The strategy, it's our responsibility to deliver mid-teens, call it 15% return on equity to investors in that business. That's us, and it's our investors that invest in the equity sidecar at the ODIP series. We will make decisions that are sensible relative to the long-term orientation of the business. I think what you've seen is a little bit of what I just touched on. We've been in a period of extraordinarily tight spreads. We are going through an interest rate transition. As we benefited, as rates backed up, there is a headwind in earnings as rates normalize. Now, we'll see how many rate cuts actually materialize beyond the four that have already happened.
The curve, the markets would suggest another three and a half this year and another five in total by sometime next year. Tight spreads bring with them asset behavior in terms of prepayments, which was a bit more than we expected. It is all what I view to be transitionary relative to a long-term plan, which is unchanged. We still expect the business to grow 10% over time, over the same time period. The strategy is the same. It is to access liabilities and invest appropriately against them. I think we did the right thing in the quarter. We were able to access cheap spread liabilities, principally in the form of funding agreements. We did not think it was appropriate to invest that in tight spread assets at the same time. Athene has today about $20 billion of cash and liquid assets awaiting deployment.
That reflects April business as well as Q1 business. That is the orientation around the business. We will put that to work as conditions permit, as we think is appropriate.
On the liability side, how should investors be thinking about Athene's potential inflow profile this year versus your kind of over $70 billion target, $70 billion, or I think last year was $71 billion? I'm particularly curious, you know, one of the factors you called out on the earnings call was competition in the retail market. What are you seeing and how is that manifesting? More broadly, to what degree do you think a decline in rates could be a headwind to potential demand?
Another multiplier. Yeah. We wrote about $25 billion of business in the first quarter, plus another $10 billion in the month of April. We discussed that on the call last week. The $25 was roughly 10 of retail annuities, 10 of funding agreements, and then five through a reinsurance channel. That is all relative to an actual last year of $70 billion and an expectation this year that we would be slightly north of that. Our long-term guidance is that top-line growth should average $85 billion over five years. Think $70 becomes $100 if you interpolate that. We are obviously at a faster pace today based on four months, but I would not run rate that. I would still sort of anchor back to a bit north of $70 billion for the year, but it is going to be entirely dependent on the marketplace.
We are able to be very flexible about the volume of funding agreement business that we write. There are periods of time, like we've seen in the first part of this year, where, as I said, spreads were really tight and it was attractive financing, and we leaned in. I don't think we've written that much business in a single quarter before. That was our largest funding agreement quarter. Annuities, the comment around annuities and spread pricing pressure is really relative to where you can invest against that. I would look at the net spread that you earn from retail growth relative to the asset allocation that goes with that. It was tighter in the quarter. We always want to be in the channel. We can modulate the volume that we write through pricing, which is quite flexible.
I would think, you know, $10 billion plus or minus for the quarter, think $35 billion-$40 billion for the year as a guide and some reinsurance flow on top of that. Funding agreements will be probably the bigger variable in where we get to.
Maybe could you talk a little bit more about the competitive pressure? Is it sort of, do you see incremental pricing pressure from other providers? You know, in the past, you and Marc have talked about like a rational behavior in the channel. Can you just unpack that bit a little bit more?
Yeah, it's actually, it's not the first time we've seen this. We've had times in the past where we've had competition and rates on annuities reflect that. Really, we expect it will pass. Is it three months, is it six months? It's hard to know. It really is dependent on when asset spreads are at a level that you can write a business that meets sort of long-term return expectations. It is a little perplexing that others are doing what they're doing without what I think are two of our key strengths, which is a really efficient cost structure. Our cost structure is 20 basis points and is one of, if not the lowest in the business, reflecting the scale that we have and what we've done over the last 15 years. Then origination capability.
If you can't originate interesting, risk-return adjusted, and therefore spready assets to invest against, then you're dependent on accessing the market and buying what's available in the market. You know, when you put all of that together, a mid-teens type ROE for those businesses feels unsustainable if they're writing business at current pricing without the cost advantage and without the origination advantage. It should sort of take care of itself.
Got it. That is a good segue. I'd like to ask now about origination, fixed income replacement. Maybe just to start, growing proprietary origination capacity is clearly central to your longer-term growth plans. You know, how would you characterize recent borrowing demand? You know, are you seeing tariff-related uncertainty causing delays? Like, what does the demand look like?
It's actually really strong. We originated last year, we originated $220 billion of total origination across principally debt. First quarter, we wrote $55 billion of origination. That was very diverse. It was the platforms, which was close to half. The platforms is both consumer credit and wholesale credit. It was our broad credit businesses, real estate, debt, CLO, other forms of large high-grade origination. Then it was origination across our hybrid and our equity businesses. You know, it feels like we are at this stage, given the strength of the pipelines that we see across all of our businesses, we're at least on track to meet what we did last year, if not exceeded. I think if you look at how has the construction of the business changed and the pipeline changed in view of tariffs, not by much.
I think we've seen a couple of things delayed, which may have been done more quickly. Amid uncertainty, the borrowers decided to push back a bit. At the same time, the pipeline's been replaced with other financing opportunities that we hadn't contemplated, which have filled that in. It is a little fluid, but it feels robust and it feels like the origination capability across the whole platform is really healthy.
Yeah. What about high-grade corporate solutions? Another kind of unique sort of capability at Apollo that gets a lot of attention. You know, how should we think about similarly demand there? One of the key debates is sort of this ongoing topic of competition with the traditional bank lending market. You know, how do you see it? What are your expectations there for the year? You know, what are you seeing from the kind of behavior from banks?
I think it's actually much the same. I can't remember a time when the pipeline has been as full as it has been today. That is mostly investment grade, corporate solutions, large corporate financings that we are able to provide because we have access to long-duration capital. You know, why do people come to us versus go either to the market or to the bank? They tend to have a particular structuring need or complexity that they're trying to solve for. They tend to be wanting financing in size and they want to be dealing with one party. We are able to do that given the structuring capabilities we have and the balance sheets we have, both Athene's balance sheet, other insurance balance sheets, and other third-party balance sheets that we syndicate to.
The whole notion of competition with the banks and does deregulation create a headwind around that? On some level, at some margin, it does make the banks more competitive. The scale of the financing that's needed across particularly the industrial renaissance that we talk about, the data centers, the infrastructure to data centers, power supply, energy transition, and now I think increasingly defense spending is just enormous. The banking system just cannot provide the quantum of financing that's required to do that. You know, we have relationships with banks, partnerships with banks. The flow is strong. I think it's just an example. The whole ecosystem is developing. We will finance our competitors. We will syndicate to our competitors. We will partner with banks. We will do sole source.
It's just the whole financing of the private marketplace is evolving sort of real time and we've got a front row seat to that.
Staying sort of in this area, you know, on the institutional side, you guys have talked about an opportunity with traditional LPs to service the fixed income portion of their balance sheets, not just the alternatives bucket. Where would you say we are in this evolution? Are there any kind of helpful anecdotes you can share from initial conversations you've had with these clients?
We're at like infancy stage, like we are on a number of the initiatives we're working on. I think the thesis is the notion of fixed income replacement. Why would you not have a portion of your portfolio invested in private investment grade and spread your assets if it sits in a part of the portfolio that is able to take long-term risk? That doesn't need to be interest rate duration. It just may mean the tenor of the loan. I think the more sophisticated institutions have realized that. You know, it's starting to happen with third-party insurance accounts. It's starting to happen with select LPs. This is at the infancy in just the investment grade fixed income piece. Where does it go from here? It should evolve into hybrid equity and it should evolve ultimately to equity.
Equity at some point in the future in private form should be a partial replacement for public equity given the scale of the markets and the amount of the markets that are private and not public. We do not think that is today's business, but we are definitely focused on this public-private convergence specific to investment grade credit. We are putting a lot of time into it and think it has got a lot of runway ahead.
Got it. Kind of wrapping up the conversation on IG credit, you know, there's been a number of media reports indicating Apollo is building out broader fixed income trading capabilities to kind of help imbue more liquidity into private markets. Clearly something you'd be doing with State Street, although I'm sure there are many different kind of flavors of what you're doing. Can you talk about your activities here and what are Apollo's broader ambitions in terms of market making for private credit?
Right. The question is, why do we need to do this? We believe there needs to be a mechanism to trade credit, which is private, for it to be as a use case, to make it a more accepted asset class for institutions. Even though it may be sitting in a part of the portfolio where there is not a liquidity need, the notion that you cannot sell it and you would have to sort of go and try and find a buyer is something that I think creates an impediment to owning it. If there is a mechanism, an exchange, a liquidity facility that is being provided, then it makes it an asset class which is ownable in the event that it needs to be sold. We do not expect that we will be the only ones doing this.
We expect, and we're talking to others about partnering with them. We expect others will do their own trading. Again, it is another example of sort of infancy stage. We've traded to date with about 60 counterparties. We've traded $2 billion of credit, which is a start, but small relative to the scale of what we think is in front of us. I think you mentioned State Street and the ETF. Some of this is also required. If we are providing investment grade credit to State Street, then their investors have liquidity rights and therefore there needs to be a liquidity mechanism on the credits that we're providing to them. We are with State Street providing daily pricing three times a day on each asset that we've provided to them. This will just continue to build out over time.
I would expect, given the real illiquidity in the public fixed income markets, if you're not, you know, we saw it here with LDI a few years ago. We saw it in the golds market. In the last month, if you were trying to buy or sell an off-the-run bond, corporate bond, it was extremely difficult to do that. The only bonds that were really trading were on-the-run bonds. That is just, I think, an indication that the amount of dealer capital that supports fixed income trading desks relative to the size of the market is just insufficient. Over time, that just creates the need for there to be more, you know, the delineation between private and public fixed income becomes less and less. The need to have a liquidity mechanism in place to make it acceptable and ownable is part of the overall thesis.
Really interesting. I want to come back to the State Street partnership in a little bit, but maybe spending a little time in the asset management business. Just, you know, we started out talking about the environment. Similar question here in terms of deployment, like how would you describe the deployment environment? Where are you finding the most compelling opportunities today?
It's the same, excuse me, it's the same question as the origination. It's obviously connected. Deployment is a function of origination. It is across the board from the purest form of private equity down to investment grade credit. By dollar value, it's investment grade credit. Then it's below investment grade. We're deploying across the platform in renewables, in climate, in infrastructure, GP-led secondaries. The equity pipeline is strong. We've talked a lot about credit. Deployment, it's really the same question as origination, but it's exceedingly healthy.
How about on the private equity side? Traditional private equity, less of a growth driver these days, but your performance has been quite strong. How should we think about, first of all, the evolution of your private equity franchise and some of the newer equity-adjacent franchises longer term within Apollo?
PEs, it's a great business and we expect it will be. It's had very strong returns over time. We've been quite public about the fact that it's not going to grow as the private equity sort of flagship strategy will not grow as much as most other businesses because the opportunity is not as great. That being said, our private equity team, it's a talent source. Many of the people running businesses or regions today came out of private equity. Matt Michelini runs Asia, private equity partner. Rob Seminara runs Europe, private equity partner. Niall Matter running what we're calling new markets, a former private equity partner. David Sambur now runs private equity, was co-running it with Matt Nord. He's now responsible for real estate and the bridge acquisition and integrating that. Matt Nord moved over to run the hybrid business.
It is a massive talent creator and many, many of the people to that point go on to run important parts of the firm. I think it's also important that they are then able to take their investment orientation that they've learned over a couple of decades in private equity and apply it to adjacent strategies. That is where we are seeing growth in our secondaries business, in our infrastructure business, and in our climate business, all of which are equity-like businesses, obviously with a specific focus. That is, you know, it's partly because of the people, it's because of the investment process that's been honed over a long period of time. I would expect, you know, the PE business in and of itself will always be a core part of who we are. It's one of the things we're obviously known for.
The adjacent businesses to private equity, the ones I just mentioned, and that does not count the hybrid businesses where we will see the real growth in the equity strategy.
Maybe just lastly on the asset management within that kind of business, you know, Q1 ACS fees were quite solid, a little bit better than people were expecting, you know, mid-old market volatility. How do you think the rest of the year should shape up and what are the kind of key swing factors that we should be thinking about?
This is partly connected to the high-grade question that you asked. I think in a quarter when the markets really sort of locked up, the fact that we did 100 transactions that contributed to that $150 million, and that $150 million was right on the average of the last 12 months, I think is a testament to the franchise. You know, this business has, relative to where it was three years ago under the leadership of the guys that run that business, become a really important part of our franchise. I think the interesting thing is, and we talked about pipelines before, the interesting part about the business is we have a pretty good line of sight into what we'll get done this quarter. We have a decent line of sight into the opportunity ahead for Q3 and partly for Q4.
You know, a lot of these transactions are complex, require a significant amount of structuring. There's always, you know, borrower dependencies that they're trying to solve for and work through. You know, they're not like sort of drive-by transactions where someone wants to do a financing and you can get it done the next week. They tend to have like a structuring incubation period to get them put together. You know, as we build out the team and we build out teams to cover corporate borrowers as well as sponsor borrowers, you develop, you know, with the right metrics and sort of tracking, you develop a good line of sight into what's coming for the next couple of quarters. You turn into repeat borrowers.
You know, we're seeing already transactions that were financed by us two or three years ago need to be refinanced for some reason. So we're seeing the start of repeat business in that franchise.
Great. All right, let's talk about wealth a little bit. I recall the messaging from your earnings call was really no change in April in terms of flows. What about just like general conversations with wealth advisors? I mean, how have those changed over the past few months? Could it be that maybe what could have been some softness was offset by just ongoing organic growth, penetration of the advisor base? Like what are you sort of hearing from that distribution channel?
It's interesting. It does feel different. Obviously conscious of what others are saying on the same question, it does feel different relative to SVB and First Republic in terms of just the reaction of retail investors to invest in the product. I don't think anyone is seeing the redemptions tick up the way that they were two or three years ago. I think the real answer is the aperture around the business. It's another one of these early stage, sort of infancy stage businesses where the aperture is just continuing to increase.
As we bring new products through new distribution points to all three regions, and you see the pickup in demand for different products and you see the regional appetite for different products, the aperture is increasing, the whole ecosystem is increasing because of the product set that we can bring, the distribution of that to clients and then the ultimate demand for that from end investors. It is just, and like we spend a lot of time on this, this is the area we invest the most amount of sort of OpEx. It is the area where we are hiring the most people. We have a strong conviction that this is a growth business for us for many years. You also learn a lot as you do it. You know, how you get products in an appropriate format brought to market is really important.
This then connects to partnerships with traditional firms. It's similar. If we have a global wealth product that may be appropriate for a traditional asset manager, then you're sort of solving two problems at the same time. Yeah, it does feel, again, infancy stage. Not everything will go right and we'll learn from that, but it feels like an early stage opportunity.
I want to come back to your partnership comment, but maybe just on the product side, you know, the last couple of years you've been launching quite a few. There's like a dozen, maybe more products in the market. How do you feel about the suite? Any asset classes or any structures, anything like that that's missing or do you feel like it's pretty fully built out?
I think it's pretty fully built out. I don't think there's anything that's obviously missing. It's certainly possible we bring others to market. If we look at our three strategies, equity, hybrid, and credit, we have at least three products represented in each of those sleeves, if you like. We have an infrastructure variant, a secondaries variant in equity. We have AAA, and we have other variants in hybrid value, and we have a series of credit products. You know, it may be that existing structures are tweaked, but it's really now about getting them to market in a way that's most acceptable for a local market. The 11 or 12 products that we have are represented in multiples of that of structures that come to market. In Europe, is it Larkspur? Is it Cayman? Is it an LTIF structure?
For DC, is it a CIT structure? There is a lot of structuring effort that goes into it. No, I think we are pretty well rounded out on product capability. It comes back to, can you originate and get it to the right place? Can you fulfill the demand for it? Can you partner with firms to make it as efficient, an investable product as possible? Technology is obviously a part of that. We are making investments in technology platforms that allow us to do that. Exciting. It feels like, again, relative to where we were not even two years ago in terms of product capability, completely different place.
Maybe come back to the partnerships now. Maybe just to start, can you walk through some of the larger partnerships that you've forged on the wealth side? And you know, what are the current public, sorry, hybrid public-private products that you offer today?
The partnerships that we've announced, we have two products with State Street and one with Lord Abbett. In there, there's an ETF, an interval fund, and a target date fund. They are focused on credit. Providing private credit to a traditional asset manager to then be combined with public credit in some sort of a mix. The mix could be 30-70, it could be 10-90. As I mentioned on the question you just asked me before this, the delivery mechanism to get product to the traditional asset managers may well be a semi-liquid type fund structure where you offer a sleeve of that to the traditional asset manager. I think model portfolios is an important part of this.
I think the industry is spending time on how do you work to develop a model portfolio where there's a default investment into an agreed product for every incremental dollar of capital that's raised. You see this across our peer set with other partners that have been announced. I think everyone has sort of agreed that this is a strategy that needs to be pursued. It won't be exclusive. There won't be a large traditionalist exclusive with a large old. I think you'll find our capabilities are needed in different ways to complement what they're able to bring.
We'll talk about State Street for a minute. You mentioned before we talked about fixed income liquidity and that partnership. Maybe just kind of give us an update on early kind of progress. Like what are your reads on sort of initial fund flows, asset levels? You know, how is the product being distributed? You know, initial reception from advisors, that sort of thing.
It's off to a good start, but it's one of these things where it'll probably take six or twelve months to get real traction. I think we're pleased with the early success the product's had. I think it's being viewed to be innovative. It's a first of its kind. With that comes education. It's just part of our continuing effort to bring product that we think is attractive to investors that need that. That's sort of the current state with State Street.
Is there a future state where, I mean, we talked about fixed income replacement, you talked about equity replacement, could we see private equity investments in an ETF? I mean, this may be quite a ways off, but it's clearly part of your ambitions to make these markets more liquid, more accessible. Is that something that could be in the cards one day or too difficult?
It's a more difficult question to answer because this gets into a conversation around what's appropriate for individual investors. Is that an asset class that's appropriate for 401(k)? I think there's different perspectives on that in the industry. I think we see a clear need for credit. Over time, may there be needs for equity. I think others are trying that, but it's not a current emphasis of us to deliver on that. We're really focused on credit products in different formats.
Got it. One last question of this umbrella. You know, on the earnings call, there was some discussion about your new markets unit. We talked a little bit about that earlier. Can you just maybe give us a high-level understanding like what this means? What are the strategic implications of that strategy?
Yeah, new markets is really an effort to formalize some things we've been doing in the last couple of years under the leadership of one individual who can really shepherd a number of these innovations and make it a full-time focus. I look at the evolution of how do we raise capital. We started as an industry and the bedrock for the last 30 plus years has been institutional capital. Raising capital from institutions around the world, obviously that's shifted to Asia and the Middle East over time. LPs have become much more sophisticated in terms of how they allocate capital. That's one bucket. Global wealth is another bucket. Bringing products to market that are appropriate and scalable and efficient is obviously a big focus for the industry.
In our case and in the case of a couple of others, it's annuities and PRT through insurance captives. That is channel number three. Where do we go from here? There is 401(k). There are other forms of defined contribution. There are traditional asset managers. There are tax-advantaged products. There are sort of lifetime income planning products for inside an annuity in the case of Athene. There are all these other products that have some connection to each other and are really important as distribution channels number four and five. The effort around new markets is to put structure around this effort and really formalize it under the leadership of a really senior partner of the firm who can then build a team around that. This is less immediate this year business, but really important, we think, to the long-term growth of the firm.
I have one or two more questions, but if anybody in the audience has anything they'd like to ask, happy to open it up. If not, I can fire one more at you.
Fire away.
All right. Maybe just one more kind of wrapping it up in terms of like your longer-term targets. I mean, it sounds like a lot of confidence in the pipeline, in the sort of resumption of kind of normalized credit spreads, but maybe just talk a little about your scenario planning in your longer-term targets. You know, how does a more potentially challenging macro backdrop like the one we may be entering impact sort of like the range of outcomes?
Yeah, so the guidance hasn't changed. We were very clear about 20% FRE growth and 10% SRE growth over time. That was only six months ago. You look at that and say, okay, is the world different enough that it's changed that trajectory? I come back to what are the four primary objectives or sort of tailwinds that we are benefiting from as a business. One is, and none of them are changed by the environment. One is the industrial renaissance, the need for private capital to finance everything we just spoke about, data, infrastructure, AI, energy, energy transition, defense spending, not changed, massive opportunity. That's one. Two is public-private convergence and the marrying of yieldier, but equivalent risk private assets with public assets in a structure. Unchanged. Three is global wealth.
The need for individual investors to have access to products that institutions and family offices have had access to for many, many years and done well from that has not changed. Fourth, we have not really spoken about this, but lifetime income planning, which is more an Athene focus. Is the population aging any differently now than it was six months ago? No. Is the population any better prepared for retirement today than six months ago? No. The most sophisticated retirement planning on the globe gets people to retirement and still does a poor job of getting people through retirement. How do you get stable value income or guaranteed lifetime income through your retirement age so that you can live comfortably and know what you have to live on and plan your annual spending appropriately?
None of the four big TAMs that we think about that are relevant to growing the business, that grow both FRE and SRE are any different from what they were six months ago. That is why we are highly confident. You know, will it take a slightly different path in some cases? Yeah, sure. The opportunity is unchanged.
Great. With that, we're just about out of time. So we'll leave it there. Martin, thank you so much.
Thanks for having me. Thanks everyone for.