In the last years, most of the focus on innovation in financial services has been, it seems, on banking (investing and lending) and payment. Comparatively, fewer startups have been addressing the insurance space. This is about to change and the opportunity space is amazing. To give a few numbers, non-life insurance market world-wide in 2011 was estimated at $1,877.2 billions. The global life insurance market had total gross written premiums of $2,464.2 billion the same year. As banks, insurance companies are a balance sheet driven business, more specifically a float driven business. In the past 20 years, arguably the investment side of the insurance business has seen the most innovation. New financial products have been created  (not to the most benefit in some cases – AIG and MBS for example), access to markets have become more global and cheaper.

http://tekfin.com/2014/03/12/disrupting-insurance-the-other-financial-services-opportunity/