Ethos Technologies Inc. Class A Common Stock Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

That's a great question. Ethos transforms the buying, selling, and risk management of life insurance. We deliver a 10-minute purchase journey instead of 10 weeks of paper applications, medical exams, blood tests, and this allows consumers to have a much simpler and easier experience to solve this critical cornerstone of their family's financial plan. It also transforms the agent's life because they free up so much time to prospect and sell more policies than they otherwise would having to case manage people through the legacy incumbent process. And then for carrier partners, we allow them to grow incrementally at their target IRRs in a very risk-conscious manner. It really is a platform that benefits all three sides and parties.

It's a great question. The industry's growing around 3% on average compared to Ethos, which is growing substantially higher than that. I think the underlying value proposition and the product market fit has enabled sustainable unit economics in differentiated go-to-market strategies. The instant transactional nature of the end-to-end technology platform has made it possible to make D2C work as an acquisition channel where it previously could not have been done by an incumbent. The underlying value proposition is allowing us to take share of the independent agent community, onboard agents at an unprecedented growth rate, have those agents reach peak productivity levels of selling more and more policies per agent than was ever previously possible, enabled by the end-to-end frictionless platform across a whole portfolio of products. We're optimistic about growing both of these core distribution strategies.

I think if I think about the direct business, it really is in the early innings and could be like a Progressive or a Geico-like transformation of the industry, where you had an agent-dominated strategy with a manual offline process. You make it simple and easy online, and half the market goes to D2C as it did in auto insurance. I think we could realize that future faster because we don't have to grow our surplus capital in relation to our client demand. Ethos is a non-risk-bearing company. We have no balance sheet, we have no commissions at risk, and we have ample balance sheet carrier partners who want to grow premiums being received from us faster than we are growing them. So, I'm excited to see that transformation occur over the coming years and decades.

On the third-party independent agent side, agents are 90% of life insurance sales today. We look very different from a typical carrier. We allow agents to have a successful career, especially as a new agent, you can onboard, learn, sell a policy, get paid the next day a commission, reinvest those commissions in lead buying or prospecting, and so on and so forth.

We realized early on that we needed to both vertically integrate and take over almost all operations that are typically housed within a carrier. Things like underwriting, administrating policies, payments and commissions infrastructure, being the system of record. At the same time, we couldn't rely on the same third-party, antiquated, on-prem mainframe and other legacy solutions that carriers are hobbled by today. So it led to us building a completely native technology platform. All core systems are Ethos-built. Our admin systems, underwriting engines, payments and commission infrastructure, agent operating systems, et cetera. They're all purpose-built for Ethos and how we do business.

They all seamlessly work together, and so it allows us to be a virtuous learning cycle business in a much more frictionless manner than a typical carrier that sitting between them and their client is a fractured data infrastructure, on-prem systems, a medical exam underwriting process, a PDF application, a mandatory sales agent. There's so much more sludge in that virtuous learning cycle business than in our business today. So having a native technology platform was of the utmost importance. The second was really advancing the state of underwriting. What I would analogize it to is if we were credit underwriters, it's like the rest of the market can compile FICO in 10 weeks, and we can compile it instantly with a near perfect supplement of data for a traditional medical underwriting process.

What it's not is us going and underwriting off some really different kind of data like analogous to your social media profile or something like that. It's really we're absorbing medical data like your pharmaceutical records, your medical claims billing data that would get coded back to your health insurance company, showing us what doctors you've seen, what tests or procedures you've had. We're absorbing your prior blood labs information from your last medical exam. So information that's a near perfect supplement for a manual health life insurance underwriting process, but we're compiling it instantly. Then there are two core layers of IP in our underwriting engine. The first is translating this morass of structured and unstructured data into a proprietary information graph. Then a second layer is computing that complex information graph into an accurate pricing decision.

In a highly levered business where one mispriced apple can spoil a bundle of 300 accurately priced apples. It's a very complicated data science, and we automated it slowly, percentage point by percentage point over a 5 to 6-year period. But what we got to was really a transformative transactional experience where we can confidently issue life insurance in 10 minutes online at a price that's comparable to if you were to go through a full medical exam. And that has allowed us to open up all sorts of incredible growth opportunities.

I think it's a combination of factors. One, our underwriting engine uniquely puts us in a position to be able to automate not only the simple, easy, younger, healthier person, but the more complicated older person with preexisting health conditions and unclean data and just complicated conflicting variables. So the technology is a big part of it. The execution and the team and the rules and logic IP that we've developed is very complicated and hard to reproduce. We really got there out of necessity. Our D2C unit economics could not have been sustainable in absence of this. A typical carrier that relies on agent-based sales has less of a need to make that journey and make that leap and do that incredibly hard work, and they may not have the technology or the resources internally to be able to achieve it either.