Apollo Global Management, Inc. (New)

Good morning, and welcome to Apollo Global Management's third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. During today's discussion, all callers will be placed in listen-only mode, and following management's prepared remarks, the conference call will be open for questions. This conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Noah Gunn, Global Head of Investor Relations.

Thanks, Operator, and thanks to all of you for tuning in to our call this morning. Joining me today are Mark Rowan, CEO and co-founder, Scott Kleinman, co-president, and Martin Kelly, our chief financial officer and co-chief operating officer. Earlier this morning, we issued an earnings release and financial supplement, which are available on our website. As a reminder, today's call may include forward-looking statements and projections, which do not guarantee future events or performance. We do not undertake any duty to revise or update such statements to reflect new information, subsequent events, or changes in strategy. please refer to our most recent quarterly and annual reports and other SEC filings for a discussion of the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. We will be discussing certain non-GAAP measures on this call, which we believe are relevant in assessing the financial performance of the business. And you'll find reconciliations of these metrics within our earnings materials available at apollo.com backslash stockholders. With that, I'd now like to turn it over to Mark to kick off our comments for today.

Thank you, Noah. Good morning. It's my pleasure to start out and outline another quarter of very strong results. DE for the quarter was $1.71 per share, our highest quarter on record. FRE of 300 million or 68 cents a share, very strong performance. FRE for the first nine months, $2.01 per share, up 16 percent year over year for the same period. And as you will hear from Scott, we're seeing strong momentum across all fronts, whether it's investment, deployment, realization, or fundraising. Year-to-date organic Athene inflows plus third-party fundraising were $44 billion, and we expect them to exceed $55 billion for the year. Importantly, this will be a record year of organic growth at Athene, and equally as important, this will be a record year of fundraising in a non-flagship year for Apollo, and this, again, is despite headwinds from the end of 2020. We are well positioned to execute on our long-term targets and deliver for our shareholders. Let me now pivot from the quarter and focus on next year and the next five years. Two weeks ago, many of you endured five hours of us walking you through our strategic plan. We enjoyed the opportunity to share our roadmap and to show you how we are positioned to drive the business forward. Rather than rehearse or repeat five hours worth of material, for those who are interested, let's hit the cliff notes. We're in a growth business driven by the need for retirement income in an anemic market. Our addressable market is the largest among our alternative peers, focused in particular on fixed income replacement. Athene is a competitive differentiator and a growth accelerant. Our model is highly capital efficient, and I will focus a little bit on this quarter's activities and show you just how efficient. And we have a strong momentum behind a fully aligned industry-leading team and continue to add amazing talent. A reminder, our business is not about just scale. It is not about AUM. It is about delivering excess return per unit of risk to our clients. That is the promise of alternatives. And so long as we do that, we will continue to grow. And the reminder to everyone in our firm is that AUM growth is the reward for good performance. It is not the goal. As many of you took away from the five-hour dialogue, our plan embeds three key bets. One, an expansion into retail following the democratization of finance. The second, growth in capital solutions. And the third, direct origination and scaling of direct origination from roughly $80 billion on an annual basis run rate this year to $150 billion five years out. While progress was made against all three objectives, this quarter was all about origination with numerous platform additions within our ecosystem. The team, led by Chris Edson, is laser-focused on continuing to scale our origination, which ultimately is one of the drivers of growth in our fixed-income replacement business and our yield business. Just to highlight three additions to our ecosystem announced or closed this quarter. The first was MaxCap. MaxCap is an Australian CRE financier and fund manager. The second is NuFi. NuFi is a technology-driven multi-channel mortgage lender. And the third is Wheels, which will be merged with our existing Donlin fleet platform, creating combined fleet business with $5 billion of pro forma assets and 550,000 customers. Each of these three will drive significant amounts of investment-grade private and spread-enhancing origination. Origination and the ability to find spread without taking on increased risk is the driver to success in our yield business. Importantly, none of the capital to add to these three platforms or to acquire these three platforms was required from the Apollo holding company. As many of you who tuned into our investor day understand, we run an incredibly capital-efficient business and are able to scale these origination platforms without capital from the holding company, leaving us free to deploy that capital toward growth initiatives or to return to shareholders. In summary, our business is changing rapidly. Markets, rates, and technology and democratization of finance are all sources of this change. Rather than fear this change, we embrace this change. We're going to continue to lead into technology and innovation and capitalize on these disruptive trends. The platform continues to attract incredibly high-quality talent, and I'd highlight just two for this quarter. First, Bill Lewis, joining us as senior partner and a member of Apollo's Management Committee, and the second, Dave Stangis, our new Chief Sustainability Officer, also a member of Apollo's Management Committee. With that, I'll now turn over to Scott to review the quarter in more detail.