Athene Holding Ltd

The key components of our long-term growth strategy are as follows:

•Expand Our Organic Distribution Channels –We plan to grow organically by expanding our retail, flow reinsurance and institutional distribution channels with a focus on international expansion, particularly in Asia. These organic channels generally allow us to adjust our product mix to originate liabilities that meet our return targets in diverse market environments.

We expect our retail channel to continue to benefit from our credit profile, strong financial position, suite of capital-efficient products and product design capabilities. We believe that this should support growth in sales at our desired cost of funds through increased volumes in each of our existing retail channels, including via expanding our bank and broker-dealer networks, as well as entering new markets such as defined contribution plans. However, we do not seek to achieve volume growth at the expense of profitability. As a result, we adjust our retail pricing more rapidly for changes in asset yields than many of our peers.

Within our flow reinsurance channel, we expect our credit profile and growing reputation as a valuable reinsurance counterparty will enable us to attract additional flow reinsurance partners and maintain or increase our flow reinsurance volumes with existing counterparties. Our ability to provide attractive solutions to reinsurance partners was demonstrated by our entry into the Japanese and other Asia-Pacific markets and the establishment of several partnerships with Japanese, other Asia-Pacific and US financial institutions over the past several years. Similar to our retail channel, we do not seek to achieve volume growth at the expense of profitability and therefore tend to respond more rapidly to adjust our pricing for changes in asset yields than many of our peers.

We expect to grow our institutional channel by continuing to engage in programmatic issuances of funding agreements and pursuing additional pension group annuity transactions. Our demonstrated ability to create customized solutions for pension group annuity counterparties seeking to reduce or eliminate their exposure to pension obligations will continue to allow us to be active in this channel. Going forward, we expect to build on our growth in the US and explore options for transactions in other jurisdictions.

•Pursue Attractive Inorganic Growth Opportunities –We plan to continue leveraging our expertise in sourcing and evaluating inorganic transactions to grow our business profitably. We believe that our demonstrated ability to successfully consummate complex transactions, as well as our relationship with Apollo, provides us with distinct advantages relative to other acquisition and block reinsurance counterparty candidates. Furthermore, we have achieved sufficient scale to provide meaningful operational synergies for the businesses and blocks of business that we acquire and reinsure, respectively. Consequently, we believe we are often sought out by companies looking to restructure their businesses.

•Expand Our Product Offering –We seek to build products that meet our policyholders’ retirement savings objectives, such as accumulation, income and legacy planning. Our products are customized for each of the retail channels through which we distribute, including independent marketing organizations (IMOs), banks, and independent broker dealers, and represent innovative solutions that meet the needs of policyholders in each of these channels. We continue to release updated or new products to meet the evolving needs of policyholders. Our diverse Fixed Indexed Annuity (FIA) product offerings are complemented by a number of innovative custom indices, which allow our customers to gain access to sophisticated strategies that are designed for better performance within our products. During 2024, approximately 52% of sales went to custom indices that are only available through our products. In 2024, Athene was recognized for its indexed annuity lineup by winning “Best Fixed Indexed Annuity/Variable Indexed Annuity Carrier” from Structured Retail Products and “Best Carrier” from Structured Product Intelligence. In addition, we are creating products that capitalize on the capabilities of both Apollo and Athene and will facilitate Apollo’s distribution of these products.

•Leverage Our Merger with Apollo –We intend to continue leveraging our close relationship with Apollo to source high-quality assets with attractive risk-adjusted returns. Apollo’s global scale and reach provide us with broad market access across environments and geographies and allow us to actively source assets that exhibit our preferred risk and return characteristics. We will also continue to partner with Apollo’s portfolio of origination platforms, which provide us assets with higher spreads than those available in the public markets. See –Investment Management for more information regarding Apollo’s origination platforms. Our relationship with Apollo will allow us to continue to offer creative solutions to insurance companies seeking to restructure their businesses and may enable us opportunities to source additional volumes of attractively priced liabilities.

Finally, our relationship with Apollo will continue to provide us with access to on-demand capital through ACRA. We believe this capital will continue to be instrumental to executing our growth strategy. See–Capitalfor additional information regarding ACRA.

•Allocate Assets during Market Dislocations –As we have done successfully in the past, we plan to capitalize on future market dislocations to opportunistically reposition our portfolio to capture incremental yield. For example, regulatory changes in the wake of the financial crisis have made it more expensive for banks and other traditional lenders to hold certain illiquid and complex assets, notwithstanding the fact that these assets may have prudent credit characteristics. The repressed demand for these asset classes has provided opportunities for investors to acquire high-quality assets that offer attractive returns. For example, we see continuing opportunities as banks retreat from direct mortgage lending, structured and asset-backed products, and middle-market commercial loans. We intend to maintain a flexible approach to asset allocation, which will allow us to act quickly on similar opportunities that may arise in the future across a wide variety of asset types.

•Maintain Risk Management Discipline –Our risk management strategy is to proactively manage our exposure to risks associated with interest rate duration, credit risk and structural complexity of our invested assets. We address interest rate duration and liquidity risks by managing the duration of the liabilities we source with the assets we acquire through asset liability management (ALM) modeling. We assess credit risk by modeling our liquidity and capital under a range of stress scenarios. We manage the risks related to the structural complexity of our invested assets through Apollo’s modeling efforts. The goal of our risk management discipline is to be able to continue to grow and achieve profitable results across various market environments. See Item 7A. Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Riskfor additional information.