American Equity Investment Life : 2022 CEO Letter to Shareholders

Anant Bhalla,

Chief Executive Officer

As I enter my third year as CEO, I wanted to start my annual letter to you by reflecting on the past two years, and how we are approaching strategy and organizational culture at American Equity, the latter being the secret ingredient for sustained success of any organization over the long term. Over the past two years, the world around us has changed dramatically, including COVID-19 transitioning from a global pandemic to an endemic that will likely be an ongoing part of our daily lives, heightened geopolitical risks not seen since the Second World War, potential de-globalization of world trade with on-shoring or near-shoring of supply chains, and macro-economic environments both in the United States and globally seemingly at inflection points with the path for financial markets becoming increasingly uncertain.

American Equity provides guaranteed promises to over 500,000 individuals and their families - helping our policyholders to live their lives or pass on a legacy with financial dignity.

The past two years have made it abundantly clear that a volatile and complex world is serving up change at an accelerating pace. Both individuals and organizations need to determine how they will thrive in such an environment. At our company, we started by re-imagining ourselves from being a U.S. focused fixed index annuity (FIA) originator for the first twenty-four years of our existence, to a more customer-focused purpose-driven company that has a high degree of vertical integration into our value chain creating a sustainable franchise across economic cycles. In essence, operate as a more global, asset management-focused insurance provider. We first outlined this new business model, dubbed as "American Equity 2.0", in the second half of 2020, and 2021 was the transition year towards this strategy.

Let me start with our re-imagination of American Equity's purpose. In an increasingly uncertain world, American Equity provides guaranteed promises to over 500,000 individuals and their families - helping our policyholders to live their lives, or pass along a legacy with financial dignity. The sense of fulfillment, joy and the peace of mind visible in the daily lives of our customers and their financial advisors from having promises or guarantees from American Equity is what drives our employees. Numerous research studies bear out that financially confident and happier people live longer and have a greater chance of being positive contributors to society.

In order to deliver on our purpose-driven promises to clients, American Equity has to deliver world-class performance in a number of areas, which constitute the building blocks of the virtuous fly-wheel of our new business strategy. However, even before having and executing on a robust, future forward business strategy, it is essential for an organization to have the talent and culture that is future forward. I am proud to share with you that your company has made tremendous progress in this area and has evolved into being a more adaptable, learning organization. This was abundantly visible in 2021 as we demonstrated the meta-skill of learning how to learn new things, continued to add new talent across our ranks of management in various geographies in the U.S., began to refresh the Board of Directors and embarked on a multi-year effort to re-skill our existing talent and re-engineer our business processes.

As we progress through 2022, I am most proud of the fact that American Equity's culture will become a high-performance learning organization that capitalizes on opportunities, navigates through turbulence, and shapes both the asset management and insurance industries in which we operate. It is with such a vibrant, refreshed organizational culture and the execution of our future-forward AEL 2.0 business strategy that we will continue to realize sustainable, long term shareholder value creation.