Who's behind Athene
Private / PE-owned · Apollo Global Management. A carrier owned by a large alternative-asset manager is typically run to maximize investment yield and asset growth, which can fund competitive crediting rates but also means the balance sheet answers to shareholders and an investment platform rather than to policyholders.
For a high-net-worth saver, Athene is best understood as a rate engine. Since its 2009 founding it has scaled into one of the largest fixed-annuity writers in the country, and the appeal for affluent buyers is straightforward: when you are moving a meaningful block of cash out of CDs or Treasuries into a multi-year guarantee, Athene is frequently one of the most competitive quotes on the board across term lengths.
What Athene's A+ A.M. Best rating tells you
Athene's A+ rating from A.M. Best sits firmly in the upper tier of carrier financial strength, signaling a strong capacity to meet long-dated obligations on the size of contract an affluent buyer is placing. It is genuinely strong, but it does not quite match the very top of the scale carried by the strongest legacy mutuals, which hold A++ marks.
Illustrative projection, not a prediction or a quote: $100,000 at a constant 5% for 20 years, a 24% bracket throughout, no withdrawals, fees or rate changes (a real contract's rate is guaranteed only for its term). Both lines after tax. Deferral changes when you pay tax, not whether; the net advantage here is $14,814, smaller if your bracket rises and larger if it falls.
That competitiveness traces back to the ownership. Sitting inside the Apollo platform, Athene is built around an investment-driven model that aims to earn more on the assets backing its contracts and pass some of that yield through as crediting rates. For a buyer comparing pure guaranteed return, that is a feature. It also means you are underwriting a private-capital balance sheet rather than a policyholder-owned mutual, which is the trade worth being deliberate about.
Rate-driven, fee-conscious savers who treat a MYGA as a CD or Treasury alternative and want a top-of-table guaranteed rate from a large, A+ carrier, particularly when laddering fixed-rate money across several insurers.
The A+ rating sits a notch below the A++ mutual carriers many HNW buyers anchor to, and the Apollo-backed, yield-oriented model is a different risk profile than a policyholder-owned mutual, so size the allocation deliberately rather than concentrating a large block with one carrier.
The honest read on strength is that the A+ rating is genuinely strong and appropriate for the contract sizes this audience writes, but it lands a step below the A++ marks of the top mutual names. For most HNW buyers the practical answer is not to avoid Athene but to size it: keep each carrier's exposure deliberately sized and treat Athene as one rung of a laddered, multi-carrier fixed-rate allocation rather than the whole ladder.
Before you buy
Read how to vet carrier safety and how to buy an annuity, check today's MYGA rates, and compare Athene head-to-head in our best annuity companies ranking.