American Equity Investment Life Holding Company (NYSE:AEL) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call February 17, 2023 11:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Julie Heidemann - Investor Relations
Anant Bhalla - Chief Executive Officer
Axel Andre - Chief Financial Officer
Jim Hamalainen - Executive Vice President and Chief Investment Officer
Conference Call Participants
Dan Bergman - Jefferies
Ryan Krueger - KBW
John Barnidge - Piper Sandler
Erik Bass - Autonomous Research
Wilma Burdis - Raymond James
Mark Dwelle - RBC Capital Markets
Pablo Singzon - JPMorgan
Operator
Welcome to American Equity Investment Life Holding Company’s Fourth Quarter 2022 Conference Call. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would now like to turn the call over to Julie Heidemann, Coordinator of Investor Relations.
Julie Heidemann
Good morning and welcome to American Equity Investment Life Holding Company’s conference call to discuss fourth quarter 2022 earnings. Our earnings release and financial supplement can be found on our website at www.american-equity.com. Non-GAAP financial measures discussed on today’s call and reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP measures can be found in those documents or elsewhere on our Investor Relations portion of our website.
Presenting on today’s call are Anant Bhalla, Chief Executive Officer, and Axel Andre, Chief Financial Officer.
Some of our comments will contain forward-looking statements, which refer or relate to future results, many of which we have identified in our earnings release. Our actual results could significantly differ due to many risks, including the risk factors in our SEC filings. An audio replay will be made available on our website shortly after today’s call.
It is now my pleasure to introduce Anant Bhalla.
Anant Bhalla
Thank you, Julie. Good morning and thank you all for your interest in American Equity. The fourth quarter of 2022 capped a successful year for the ongoing advancement of our AEL 2.0 strategy as we continually execute against the four key pillars. In investment management, we originated $5 billion of privately sourced assets at an expected return greater than 6% and expanded our primary focus from residential real estate in 2021 to a more diversified portfolio in 2022 covering a variety of sectors, including infrastructure, middle-market credit, and commercial real estate equity.
Across sectors, we are being disciplined and deliberate focusing on underlying assets with a resilient cash flow profile, where the majority of the return is largely delivered by the underlying operating performance and where there is an advantage for an insurance balance sheet to own the assets. With fixed income spreads widening throughout most of the year, we see this additional optionality to increase exposure in our core fixed income bucket while being more selective in our private asset strategies. In go-to-market, we substantially revamped up pricing procedures, affording us optionality to reprice products quickly as markets change.