Bancassurance and Scale Economies: Evidence from Italy

Integration between banks and insurers is a widely investigated trend in financial markets. Despite heterogeneity of bancassurance across countries, the financial crisis is reshaping both intermediaries and customers’ demand. Although previous research provides evidence of economies of scale in bancassurance, we add to this literature by investigating differences due to alternative ownership models over an extended period (1998–2012) and testing for the effects of the financial crisis through a translog cost function. We focus on the Italian market, where bancassurance plays a major role and all ownership models are present. We find that the cost function changed significantly after 2007 as new unexploited scale economies emerged, especially for independent insurers that showed earlier optimal returns to scale. More integrated groups, despite a remarkable difference in their trend for total costs, diverge in a similar fashion from independent insurers in terms of scale economies.