Just who came up with the idea of life insurance, anyway?

Insurance as a form of protection is more than 4,000 years old. Babylonian merchants paid money to release them from responsibility if their goods were stolen during transport or damaged by hazards of bad weather.

The earliest form of life insurance traces its origins to the ancient Romans, approximately 2,000 years ago. They created "burial clubs," which paid the funeral expenses of the deceased and supported surviving family members.

Move forward a few thousand years.

Much closer to our time, a couple of names you should recognize helped to shape life insurance into what we know it to be today.

• Comets weren’t the only things Sir Edmund Halley obsessed about. Among other things, such as attempting to accurately calculate the age of Stonehenge, as well as the distance between the sun and the earth, Halley is widely attributed as the creator of the first mortality table. It was published in 1693 and allowed the British government to sell life annuities at an appropriate price based on the age of the purchaser. Halley's work strongly influenced the development of actuarial science.

• Benjamin Franklin helped the Philadelphia Presbyterian Synod to establish a life insurance company, which is generally acknowledged to have issued the first insurance policy on American soil in 1761. This Philadelphia-based company was called the Corporation for the Relief of Poor and Distressed Presbyterian Ministers and of the Poor and Distressed Widows and Children of Presbyterian Ministers (this link will download a PDF file).

Fast forward to the present, where global insurance premium revenues exceed $2 trillion. American life insurance companies account for over 30% of this figure. Additional interesting life insurance facts, such as the top 10 most costliest events in the world for insurers, can be found here.

According to the latest study by a leading global insurance firm, Swiss Re, the United States is currently the largest market for life insurance premiums written. Japan is the second-largest market; followed by the U.K. Although a fairly new concept to their populations, South and East Asia are some of the fastest growing markets for life insurance.

If the Babylonians and the Romans only knew what they started….



Kawika Maszak, Garden State Life Insurance