American Equity Investment Life Holding Company (NYSE:AEL) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Pablo Singzon: Yes. Got it. That makes sense. Thank you for that. The second question I had was a numbers question. So, I am curious, on average, how much capital do you have to hold against the dollar of private assets? And how does that compare against your public fixed income assets? Just trying to get a sense of the capital consumption against your capital generation, and I think the excess capital you have, which I think was $650 as you mentioned, but any color there?

Anant Bhalla: Yes. I will start. It varies, right. I mean not to give you a non-answer, but it varies because if you look at resi loans, it’s less than BBB public corporate securities in fixed income, like I think the RBC factors like 0.6 versus NAIC 2 is 1%. If you look at real estate equity, it’s obviously 20% capital charge. When the team looks at our capital charge, the most important thing is we have a significant amount of excess capital, and we are looking at what’s the ROE that we are delivering on the private assets. And is it well not of the ROE trajectory of our business and therefore it adds value. So, in having a portfolio of $11 billion of private assets where loans are a big portion of it and then buying real assets, which you can finance between loans and equity gives us the capital charge, which even though higher than public fixed income is going to be in that range.

Now, Axel and Jim add in anything to that. Because I think what Pablo was looking for is what number to put in this model, and I don’t know if we can give him that.

Axel Andre: Right. Yes, exactly. I don’t think it’s a stretch forward number. But June’s point, the way we look at it is in the context of a financial plan and the excess capital that we have and putting that money to work, consuming some of that excess capital over time, ensuring that we are getting the return and we are delivering the returns for shareholders as we do that.

Jim Hamalainen: And this is Jim again. One thing I would add is our investment plan, our long-term projections are based €“ are fed into the corporate model to ensure the capital consumption that we have still enables the company to deliver shareholder €“ capital to shareholders. And so it’s all integrated, it’s all part of our process. So, we are thinking about that as we look at. When we say 30% to 40% private assets, we have actually made sure that that’s feasible under the construct that we are making investments and allows us to return capital to shareholders as we have indicated in the past.

Anant Bhalla: A good way to think about that, Pablo, if you want just to add to what the guy has said is we have always had this business, it’s very much sustainable as we €“ also as we position our sidecars with 15:1 leverage, which has a mix of 30%, 40% private assets and the rest public. So, you can back into the math that way, if you are levered up to 15:1. Net on a capital charge basis means you are running the business at like 7% capital, if that helps.