Jim Belardi

Grant Kvalheim

Retirement services provider and insurer Athene Annuity and Life Co. announced Monday several senior promotions amidst a push to double the firm’s assets under management by 2029. Grant Kvalheim, who had been president and CEO of Athene USA, was named as CEO of Athene.

Kvalheim will succeed Jim Belardi, the firm’s co-founder, CEO and CIO, effective July 1. Belardi’s new title will be executive chair, and he will continue to serve as the firm’s CIO.

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The new appointments are aligned with the company’s five-year growth plan, according to an Athene statement. Apollo Global Management, Athene’s parent company, laid out these plans in its 2024 investor day last October.

The plans include doubling Athene’s assets under management to about $600 billion from $302 billion by 2029 by strengthening its offerings in retirement and wealth management channels. The firm currently offers retail annuities, flow reinsurance, pension risk transfers and funding agreements.

LIMRA reported that total U.S. PRT sales came to $7.1 billion in the first quarter of 2025, according to its U.S. Group Annuity Risk Transfer Survey. That level is 51% lower than the sales during the first quarter of 2024, yet still 10% higher than the sales results in the first quarter of 2023.

Apollo warned in its 2024 investor day presentation that too many Americans are woefully unprepared for retirement, citing LIMRA and Deloitte figures that 50% of Americans are not participants in a retirement plan and more than one-third of pre-retirees are concerned about running out of money in retirement.

Apollo cited a $4 trillion retirement savings shortfall in the U.S., which the firm’s investor day report linked to a massive need for retirement income. Apollo also sized the total addressable market for retirement services at more than $45 trillion, of which Athene represents less than 1%.

“There is a massive opportunity ahead for Athene, driven by the growing retirement crisis in the U.S. and the need for guaranteed lifetime income,” Kvalheim said in a statement. “I look forward to leading Athene as our team meets this unprecedented need by expanding market share, prioritizing innovation, entering new markets and accelerating growth in the defined contribution channel.”

Sean Brennan

Mike Downing

In addition to Kvalheim and Belardi’s new titles, Athene also announced that Mike Downing, the firm’s chief operating officer, and Sean Brennan, the firm’s executive vice president of pension group annuities and new markets, will become co-presidents of Athene USA. Downing will keep his position as COO, while Brennan will also be named chief commercial officer and will continue to be in charge of new markets. Brennan’s current pension group annuities responsibilities have been transferred to another executive, according to a spokesperson for Athene.

“There is no one better positioned than Grant to lead the company through its next phase of growth,” Belardi said in a statement. “Grant, Mike and Sean have been instrumental to Athene’s tremendous success to date, and our market leadership directly reflects their efforts to grow our business by expanding distribution, creating best-in-class product offerings and establishing us as a partner of choice. My partnership with Grant has been critical to Athene’s success and I am pleased it will continue.”

Kvalheim has spent more than 14 years at Athene and previously held the titles of executive vice president, president and chief financial officer. Previously, he was the co-president of Barclays Capital the global head of credit products and investment banking at Barclays and the head of global debt, capital markets at Deutsche Bank.

He earned a bachelor of science degree in economics from Claremont McKenna College and an MBA in finance from the University of Chicago.

Products & Services June 16, 2025

Adviser-Developed Participant Engagement Platform Goes Live

Retirement plan adviser Shane Hanson has opened his Viserly platform to all interested advisers.

Reported by

PLANADVISER staff

The participant engagement platform Viserly is now available to the broad retirement plan and benefits adviser community. This rollout comes after hundreds of demos, adviser conversations and custom buildouts, says founder Shane Hanson.

Hanson, a retirement plan adviser himself, says he believes advisers have operated at a disadvantage to recordkeepers, as they have not had access to the same data in real time. This is increasingly important, he told PLANADVISER, as the competition between advisers and recordkeepers to own the participant relationship grows.

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By creating Viserly, he says, he is working to equip advisers with the tools they need to be competitive: “imagine delivering the right message, at the right time, with genuine relevance—without lifting a finger.”

The platform integrates with more than 200 payroll providers, which allows advisers to be alerted in real time about employee actions, such as new hires and terminations. With this real-time data, advisers are able to respond quickly and proactively to engage with employees and participants ahead of recordkeepers, he says. Advisers get authorization from the plan sponsor client to create this link, he says. While the platform is most useful with access to payroll data, if advisers are not able to get payroll integration, they can upload recordkeeper data to achieve similar segmentation benefits.

Hanson envisions Viserly as a data warehouse for advisers, where they are able to segment data to drive engagement in ways that align with their business model. They can do this by leveraging triggering events, such as new hires, rehires, terminations, birthdays, age milestones or other specific events. Other ways to segment messaging would be to target specific messages to particular demographic groups, such as participants earning more than $150,000 or those with a retirement plan balance that exceeds $250,000. Advisers can have templated messages to align with each of those and set those to automatically deploy, all without adviser involvement.

Viserly integrates with Microsoft and Google email accounts, meaning that when the email messages are sent, they come directly from the adviser’s email and appear in their “sent” email folder. This allow for advisers to remain in compliance, as it all flows through their email system, Hanson notes. This also allows the adviser to keep the preferred advisory brand front and center—with the branding aligning with the adviser the participant knows.

Hanson said advisers interested in learning more about Viserly can request live demos at www.viserly.com.