Apollo Global Management, Inc. (APO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning, everyone. This is Craig Siegenthaler from Bank of America, and it's my pleasure to introduce Martin Kelly. Martin is the Chief Financial Officer at Apollo, and he oversees Apollo's technology, operations, risk and audit groups and is a member of the firm's leadership team. Prior to Apollo, Martin was at Barclay's and Lehman in leadership roles in finance, investment banking and fixed income. Martin, thank you for joining us. How are you doing today?

I'm doing terrific, Craig. Thanks. I'm actually 18 of 21 of these sessions that Craig's hosting today. He tells me he's got some energy left. Thanks for having us.

So Apollo is founded in 1990 with the focus on private equity. The firm has since evolved into a diverse, global alternative asset manager with scale across all 3 channels: institutional, individual, and its leading retirement platform, where it's #1 in the world. Apollo pioneered the alternative insurance model with the creation of Athene and many of its large cap peers have since replicated the strategy. The firm now manages more than $600 billion in AUM and is 1 of the 5 largest alt managers in the world. And from 2018 to 2023, Apollo more than doubled its fee earning AUM. So it's been growing at a fast clip. All right. Let's get started.

Let's start with the retirement channel with Martin, it's your biggest business. So I want to start with how Athene is differentiated versus some of your closest comps? And what do you see as its competitive advantages?

Yes, Athene is a terrific business. Athene is 15 years old. And I think it's really -- in that time, I think that itself is a competitive advantage, because it just takes time to build a business and that itself creates a bit of a moat around the position that you have, which I'll explain. Athene -- so Athene has advantages on liability creation, on the asset investing side, accessing Apollo's mostly private credit origination capabilities, and has a very efficient cost structure. And it also has plenty of capital. And I think each of those we could go into. Athene, what many others are doing is coming into the space and buying blocks of policies. And the price to do that is high. And then the question becomes what's next? And how do you sort of appropriately invest that capital? Athene has not done an inorganic transaction now for 4 years. And so what Athene has been able to do is create high credit rating and plenty of excess capital that allows us to access currently 4 different channels. And in some of those channels, we're #1 in terms of market position, but the market is vast and growing. So I think Athene is able to differentiate itself in accessing retail flow. Last year, Athene did $65 billion of top line growth. Over half of that was retail. Athene is and has been #1 or #2 in the pension risk transfer business. Athene is developing reinsurance arrangements with other companies, most of whom are based in Asia. And then Athene has access to the funding agreement market. And so when you combine those 4 distribution channels, that creates a $60 billion-$65 billion top line growth business, which we expect to be more in 2024. So that's the liability side. The asset side, Athene has an average yield outperformance relative to the peer set of 40 basis points. And the way it's done that is Athene's balance sheet is roughly 55% Queso credit, what you'd expect to see on any balance sheet in the space, and then 40%, 45% of investment-grade private credit, all of which comes with a yield outperformance relative to comparable Queso credit. And so having access to origination sourced by a number of platforms and businesses across Apollo has been the reason that the assets, and therefore, the net spread has outperformed. And then third point, the cost base, Athene is entirely efficient. It has less than 2,000 people. It's based in West Des Moines. Its cost spread is 23 basis points and probably coming down. And then it has a highly efficient capital structure, excess capital of $2.5 billion, A+ credit rating, one of the lowest leverage ratios in the business. So we run it pretty conservatively because we want to make sure it's a fortress balance sheet and it's robust and it's able to be opportunistic when opportunities present. So we're really pleased with it. Its key differentiator -- differentiating point, I think, is the ability to grow organically, but fueled by everything I just mentioned.

Great. So Martin, Apollo targets a record $70 billion plus of organic inflows from Athene in 2024. That's up from $63 billion last year. What is the contribution from retail annuity sales embedded in that guidance? And how sustainable is that if and when the Fed starts cutting interest rates?

Yes, it's interesting. So it's about half. So about half of what the top line growth has been in each year is annuities, and we'd expect it to be about half, if not a bit more next year. And in fact, it was $35 billion in the year that we just closed out. So I think, yes, the market as a whole has benefited from higher rates is my question, but Athene has benefited by getting access to different distribution channels that have increased our market share. So if we look at the growth in Athenes annuity sales in the last 2 or 3 years, the total annuity sales are up almost 4x, but the bank contributes -- the bank distribution channel contribution to that is up 10x. So we -- and this comes back to the point I made earlier, which is a strong credit rating and strong capital gives you access to high-quality distribution channels, which we didn't previously have. So I would expect that we'll continue to grow in those higher-quality channels and take market share. And so if and when there's a tapering of rates and front-end rates come down, or the overall curve comes down, then there could be a headwind to industry growth. But I'd expect our position to continue to increase.

So Martin, there's been a very modest rise in industry defaults and losses across most asset classes, but from very, very low levels. How is the credit quality inside of Athene trended? And relatedly, how do you get comfort around managing a $300 billion-ish portfolio with very large allocations to both structured and private credit?

Yes. Big focus point, we've spent a lot of time on this. We actually published a lot of information which stratifies the portfolio. I think we probably are more transparent than most, if not all others, including stress tests, including exposures to certain asset classes. There is a notion that structured credit is riskier than non-structured credit, and we don't believe that. We think that structured credit appropriately underwritten and put together on tranche. If you are in the investment-grade pieces of that, which Athene does, then definitionally, you've given diversification, underwriting quality, and active management that comes with a higher credit profile than non-structured credit. What we found is, and you can see we publish our credit loss experience against peers, it's all on the web. Our experience has been -- our default rates are lower than the peer average over a long period of time. It's interesting where we've actually taken losses. It's tend to be in a single-name credit, idiosyncratic single-name credit, including more recently some small amount of real estate exposure, but it's not structured credit. It tends to be a situation that happens at a company where its own credit is challenged and that tends to be where we've taken -- the losses that we have taken over time. That said, it's been less than the industry average.

So on the liability side, we monitored pickup in surrenders last year, but they declined again in the fourth quarter. So most of that, I think was related to 3-year vintage annuities that exited their surrender charge periods. Was there anything surprising on the surrender front given the sharp increase in interest rates. Across my coverage, we saw liabilities in motion across financial services industries, including the banks and also the wealth managers.

Yes. No, is a quick answer. We spent -- this was a very topical area 9, 12 months ago. And I think for the right reasons, if you're on the outside looking in, we've had no deviation in our surrender experience at all, including last year and the year before. It's actually a very predictable behavior. If you break it down into the parts of the portfolio that are surrenderable versus those that are not. So 80% plus of Athene's portfolio, liability portfolio, is not surrenderable without charge, meaning it's either not surrenderable at all or it comes with either or all those surrender charges and other sort of market value termination adjustments that the [ anyone ] needs to pay. So when we look at the actual behavior and one of the reasons we've been transparent about publishing it is, we know when we're going to have upticks and downticks in surrenders baseline business that we've written 3 years ago or 5 years ago that's coming to a contractual maturity. So in Q2 or Q3 last year, we saw an uptick and so that was entirely predicted. But if you break it down, the 10% to 12% annualized surrender rate is contractual maturities which is a given. Very predictable income withdrawals from policies, for people who are at that point in their lives where they're [ driving, ] also very predictable. Surrenders on policies that are just coming out of surrender protection, also very predictable. And then there's a last piece, which is the unplanned sort of the uneconomic surrenders by people who just need to access their policy and will do that in an uneconomic way. And that is also -- it's predictable, and it's about 1% of annualized liabilities. So the deviation you see in any one period to the next tends to come for the most part from contractual maturities being higher or lower. And we've just yesterday published our forecast for the year ahead. So you can see, again, on the website, you can see the by quarter view of what we expect surrenders to be. The headline is it will be down a bit. There was some quarterly deviation for the same reasons.

Great. So my next one is how you sidecar capital vehicles to reduce the capital intensity of the retirement services business? So how do you use them to kind of grow FRE at a fast clip but on a more capital-light basis?

Yes. So really important part of the platform actually. So we have an equity cycle to Athene, it's called ADIP or ACRA, it goes by different names. We raised the first variant of that fund about 5 years ago, is $3.25 billion. And the original construct actually, back to your first question, was to help support the growth of Athene around the less predictable inorganic transactions. We quickly realized that ACRA could be used to support all growth at Athene. And so what ACRA 1 has done is support on a proportionate basis, liability growth across each of the 4 channels. The investors in that fund have had a very strong performance and a good experience. And so we've been outraising the second variant of that fund, ACRA 2, which will be somewhere between $4 billion and $5 billion by the time we're done. And the benefit of that is -- there's multiple benefits. One is, it effectively co-invest side-by-side Athene and supporting asset growth. And so while it doesn't create spread earnings for Athene because the spread goes into the sidecar, it creates the same fee-related earnings growth as any other dollar of capital coming from Athene. And so you can take $1 of ACRA capital and $1 of Athene capital, pair it to together, which will support about 10x that amount of liability growth and on the same management fees. So I actually think it leverages earnings across both sides of the house. And also, I think validates the thesis that we earn from Athene, because third parties step up and are willing to pay exactly the same fee rate that we charge Athene ex-ACRA. And so it's a really important part of the future growth of the business. So I think you'll see us -- we're able to flex that up or down based on flow in the business at different points in time. But you'll see ACRA supporting a continuing or an increasing amount of business growth at Athene as we go forward.

Martin, if we -- let's move the conversation over to private credit. And if we were talking about private credit 5 or 10 years ago, you were probably mainly talking about direct origination, corporate credit. But private credit is so much more today. ABF, infrastructure, real estate, debt, it's really broadened. So I was wondering if you could summarize private credit origination capabilities today? And then also highlight if there's any significant gaps remaining.

Yes. Also, we spent a lot of time talking about this. I think even today, actually, most of the market thinks of private credit as direct lending. And thinks of -- think of like a SOFR plus 500 to 700 loan, 10% to 12% in today's rates to a company that tends to be more middle market than larger. So like a $50 million to $100 million EBITDA, 5x leverage. That's the classic definition of private credit in the marketplace or direct lending. It's about $1.5 trillion opportunity, if you add everyone up across the platform -- across the industry. What we've done is create the notion that private credit is a far larger investment-grade opportunity. And so we define private credit as all the platforms that we operate, including the CS business, ATLAS, including mid-cap and 16 of these platforms in total. And it also includes investment-grade origination, both corporate origination, sponsor origination that we do within the firm, outside the platforms. So if the market thinks that private credit is today about $1.5 trillion, we think as you go down, all the asset classes that are investment grade, but private, we think it's a $40 trillion opportunity. And so that's what we're focused on. And so the reason it's so important is the consumers of investment-grade private credit are Athene, Athene's competitors, other insurance companies. Other investors that just want access to investment-grade private credit, it's also a great tool to syndicate to the market to people that want private credit, which is less liquid but well structured and comes with yield out performance and are willing to pay for that. And so that's another reason that we've been able to grow our syndication business from what it was to a $500 million business today because we can offer a piece of origination in syndicated form to the marketplace, which then creates other opportunities to bring in assets for those investors. So it's -- Marc talks about this a lot. The only real limit to our growth as a firm is origination. And when we talk about origination, for the most part, it's private credit, the way I've just defined it. And if we can do that, we can grow Athene, we can grow Athora, we can grow the third parties, we can grow the syndication business. And so it has -- there's multiple sort of uses of that production if we can continue to grow that with an appropriate risk return, but by targeting 100 to 200 basis points yield outperformance relative to a similar credit profile in liquid Queso form.

Martin, I wanted to dive a little deeper on third-party credit comment. This is a huge business aside of Athene. It's been growing really, really quickly. I think some people missed this. What are you doing for third parties across investment grade and non-investment grade? And how much credit AUM are you managing today outside of Athene?

So third party -- so our credit business today is just under $500 billion. About half of that is third party. And in that, I count the assets that are supported by ADIP is third-party capital. And that's a spectrum of different risk-return businesses. But the majority of that is investment grade. And so we're really focused on growing that business. But it comes back to the point I just made, you can only grow that if you have origination. And so that's why origination, both within the 16 platforms and within the other businesses that we operate outside the platforms in our credit business is so critical to future growth. So I do believe that the market puts a premium on third-party capital and fees from third-party capital. And so that's a big focus.

Great. Let's move the conversation on to product innovation and private wealth. What is your semi-liquid product lineup in private wealth look like today? And which recent product launches is the firm most excited about?

Yes. So this is a massive and again multiyear opportunity. It's one of the 3 or 4 really big opportunities that sit in front of us. What we're trying to do is bring a product to market, which is differentiated and often -- most often leverages product that we also make available to institutional investors. So I think what you are seeing us doing is bringing retail appropriate versions of institutional product to market. And I'll talk about how we distribute that. But AAA is one that we're excited about. ADS, which is a large cap investment grade, BDC is one that we're excited about. And they leverage products that are made available to institutional investors. So we have about 7 products in the market today. I think you should expect to see us bring a new product to market every quarter as we look forward. And ultimately, what we're solving for is what does the buyer want? Who is the buyer? The buyer can be a qualified purchaser. The buyer can be an accredited investor. Not every product is appropriate for both. Some need to be more liquid, some need to be less liquid. But the 7 I talk about are sort of semi-liquid that meet the definition of what an accredited investor needs. And then it's a question of how do you bring that to market. And again, I would sort of -- I put the market or segment the market in a couple of different ways. There is family office, sort of sophisticated buyers that we cover ourselves. There are consultant channels, which are really important in a massive market that takes a lot of time to get through diligence. And then it's distributing product into high net worth through money [ center ] banks and other wirehouse methods and paying for that in different ways through revenue share or through costs upfront. So we're, I think, early innings in what this is all about. But what we're really focused on is a product that's differentiated, a product that leverages our institutional capabilities and then it's designed to be -- and is structured appropriate for different segments of retail, but realizing retail is a number of different things.

So I wanted to hone in a little bit on your private BDC, ADS. Had very strong investment performance last year. Net flow momentum continue to finish the year with a strong finish. Do you think the net flow trajectory could build off a fourth quarter levels?

Yes, I do. I'll describe ADS. It's an investment grade. It's a large-cap lending business that targets companies that have -- it's not middle market. So it's about a $250 million average EBITDA company that's borrowing from ADS. Oftentimes, loans that go into ADS are also going elsewhere in our platform. So to the point I made on institutional variance of what we have. ADS is now $8 billion of assets, and it really ramped as we went quarter-by-quarter through last year. So I would expect that, that ramp will continue. That's what it looks like so far in Q1. And I think the important thing for us is to grow it sensibly over time so that we're investing throughout the course of the cycle. But that's one of the products that's in market today that's getting a lot of traction and I think we have great aspirations for.

So coming back to AAA, which is the first one you listed. It's a very unique product. It's a multi-asset product. It targets equity-like returns but minimal downside. It also has a very long-term track record that was portable outside -- inside of Athene. How has feedback for AAA been inside the private wealth channel because it is different than what a lot of your peers are selling today.

Yes, this is another -- to the same point, something that's differentiated and that has appealed to investors. And so AAA is, I think of it as an S&P replacement product with much lower volatility than the S&P. So it's meant to be a hybrid vehicle. It has a lot of the investments that we make in our platforms, including ATLAS and others are funded by AAA. It also has a number of other investments around the platform. And so if you want more information on AAA, there's plenty of information on the website and in the origination session we did last fall. But takeup has been high. I think takeup -- this gets to the point of how do you penetrate distribution channels. And it's been particularly attractive to family office as a buyer of that product. It's now on high net worth distribution channels through a couple of banks. I think up to 5 banks that are distributing the product. And it's being distributed not just in the U.S., but in Europe and Asia. So it has a global appeal we think. And each quarter, the subscriptions are higher than the previous quarter. So it's another product that I think over time will build. It's attractive as a product. It brings with the management fees, but it also allows -- it has a leveraging effect on earnings to the extent that it allows us to invest more capital in platforms, which themselves create products, origination, which create SRE and FRE, and syndication fees and so on. So it's a really -- I think that paired with ADIP, the equity sidecar for Athene, probably our 2 most important products because of -- they're not just a product that's sort of sold to an investor in its own silo, they have a synchronous effect around the platform.

So let's take a step back and I have several bigger picture questions for you. So Apollo has grown so much over the last 10 years. And I remember when you're about $40-ish billion of AUM, I forget the year, but now you're $600 billion. I mean that was a lot of growth over the last 10 to 15 years. Just given the law of large numbers, how can you continue to grow at high growth rates?

Yes. Like we are not obviously going to looking back, but -- and so looking at successes. But I think, look, we're very pleased and proud of the growth we've had. And the growth was definitely fueled by monetary and reregulation in that period of time. And so as we sit here today, we look at that and say that's unlikely to continue going forward. And whether it's a headwind or it's just a neutral, we'll see. But the change that's created the growth is unlikely to continue to be a benefit to us, okay? So then how do we keep growing? We then look at the markets that are in front of us and see -- and just view ourselves at like in the first innings of many of them. So fixed income replacement, which I spoke about, $40 trillion market, the retirement market, which has pretty unsophisticated products in it today that don't really serve people in retirement that well. That's a $40 trillion market. The high net worth market today is a $100 trillion market. I think our industry is scratching the surface in that. And then the equity replacement products like AAA and others that we're working on is also a massive market of similar size. So we're aligning ourselves around those 4 big opportunities and how we access them. And so that's what the future looks like for us. And so, yes, we're really pleased with what we've done, but it also feels like it's all in front of us at the same time.

So Martin, I have a capital allocation question for you. How should we think about the right mix of proceeds within your earnings between organic needs, especially inside of Athene, dividends, buybacks and even accretive M&A.

Yes. So I'd add compensation to that mix because I think what we're trying to do is, you've seen it, is pivot our compensation to be paying people more in the less valued parts of our earnings streams and less in the highly valued parts of the earning streams and for certain senior leaders more in stock to make sure there's proper alignment. Look, we have a number of good choices. We can -- we've raised the dividend now twice since we closed the merger with Athene. Having a lot higher dividend rate is not part of our plan. Having an S&P 500 competitive dividend rate, I think, is what we should plan for and are. So the dividend increases that you've seen should -- you should just assume will continue. Buying back stock, even with the run that we've had is attractive at a mid- to high teens growth rate, it's pretty easy math to do the ROE on that. Growing Athene is the most accretive part of use of capital. And so one of the reasons we issued a mandatory convertible last year was to get more capital in to fund several years of growth into Athene, realizing the capital constraints and the capital requirements of the business keeps changing. And then there's M&A, which we could do a small amount of M&A. If we ever did a large M&A transaction, it would probably be for stock, not for capital cash at the top of the house. We issued stock to employees to sort of set the next generation up and the next generation after that. And we've been pretty clear that we expect to buy that back and immunize it back to 600 million shares. Really, that can only come once we have carry. The carry realizations are sort of the swing factor in having more or less capital at the top of the house. And so that depends on the environment. So I think what you should expect us to do now is to immunize the stock that we've issued, but back end and not front ended over the next 3 years. So continue to pay a competitive dividend. And then we'll have excess capital to spend on growth where we see it realizing that's probably smaller-than-larger transactions.

So I have a few more questions here, but given time, I think we should check with the audience and see if there's any questions. So please raise your hand, and we can get you a microphone. We have one up here in the front.

Can you talk a bit about the competitive landscape in the retirement business, both on the retail side in terms of distribution as more people are entering that market as well as the pension space and the institutional side?

Yes, sure. So on retail, there's very -- if you look at the companies that have formed in the last decade, there's very few of them that are organically dry. They buy blocks and then they manage the blocks. And so to the point I was making, it took us a decade plus to get to where we are. And in that period of time, you probably make mistakes, you sort of chase loose ends. And so it's the situation that goes into growing that business. I think ultimately, to be -- like the market for buying business in the U.S. is wildly competitive and therefore rich, and so you need to be -- and it comes with product that you haven't underwritten, has partial surrender charges, and it's just a very difficult piece of business to earn money from. So I think what we've done is create organic growth and sort of break into, if not be at the top of that market when others have not. And frankly, probably are not able to. And so I think that's a real competitive advantage for us. And then on the pension transfer business, both in the U.S. and outside the U.S., it's an opportunity which there's about $50 billion of business traded last year, which was the same as the year before. I would have expected that to be more with plans being more fully funded. And you would expect that, that will change as we look ahead, but it's hard to predict. We look at what we know about that's in front of us right now, which is a pretty healthy pipeline. There are -- for anything but the small transactions, there's only a few competitors that can really compete in that marketplace. And so I think we're #1 last year. We've been 1 or 2 in each of the last few years, I'd expect us to be around there. If the market really cracks open and you see large either buyouts of plans or terminations of plans, then I'd expect we'd use the excess capital we have plus ADIP, plus potentially other capital to fund that growth. But as we sit here today, we sort of assume a steady-ish type market size in the year ahead, that could obviously be higher.

I have 1 up here. I wanted to talk about expense or operating efficiency and the FRE margin. Your fee margin is already very high. But maybe you can talk about incremental margins from here and how you balance investing or spending for growth relative to driving operating leverage?

Yes. It's a constant topic. The number of ideas that are floating around at any time are high. And so it requires really disciplined prioritization of what we think is actionable and where we should be spending both our time and our money in terms of hiring new people. I think if we go back 3 years, we were for sure, underinvested. And so I think one of the changes that Marc brought about when he came in as CEO was both a catch-up in investment where we'd underinvested and are leaning into new growth. And a lot of the initiatives that we've been speaking about have been funded through OpEx and absorbed in the margin that we've been able to produce. As we look forward, we see operating leverage. We're at 56% today, that we have said that, that will go to 60%. I would just look at that as a steady growth to 60% year-by-year over the next 3 or 4 years. I think what -- we know what we know in terms of businesses that we want to invest in. The reality is there's very little CapEx in our business. You need to -- there's not much M&A. So most of what you do requires P&L spend. And when you do that, you're spending costs before the revenues come, which tend to come 2, 3, 4 years later. So we're managing that glide path to get to 60% in the context of the revenue opportunities and growth that we see, knowing that we're going to have to spend more to set us up for the next leg of growth beyond the current plan.

Great. I think with that, we are out of questions. So Martin, on behalf of all of us at Bank of America, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks for having us. Thank you.