Athene is a retirement services company that issues, reinsures, and acquires retirement savings products — primarily annuities. Athene is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apollo Global Management. Athene's core products are fixed rate annuities (FRAs), fixed indexed annuities (FIAs), registered index-linked annuities (RILAs), payout annuities, and pension group annuities. Athene also issues funding agreements to institutional investors. Athene sells through four channels: a retail network of independent agents, IMOs, banks, and broker-dealers; flow reinsurance partnerships where Athene acts as a white-label balance sheet for other insurers; institutional sales of pension group annuities and funding agreements; and inorganic acquisitions or block reinsurance of policies from carriers exiting non-core businesses. Athene earns a spread between the investment yield on its asset portfolio and the crediting rates it pays policyholders. Apollo manages virtually all of Athene's invested assets, targeting higher yields by taking liquidity and complexity risk — investing in CLOs, non-agency RMBS, and directly originated loans — rather than incremental credit risk. Athene also co-invests in proprietary origination platforms to source assets at yields above what public markets offer. Because Athene's annuity liabilities are long-dated and reinforced by surrender charges, Athene can hold illiquid assets that shorter-duration investors cannot, which is the core differentiator of its model.