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Insurance Covered

The birth of modern life assurance (With Craig Turnbull)

Season 2, Ep. 24

Welcome to Insurance Covered, the podcast that covers everything insurance. In this episode Peter is joined by Craig Turnbull, Senior Technical Specialist at the Bank of England, and our topic is the birth of modern life assurance. Craig has a long background in the actuarial space and has even written a book called A History of British Actuarial Thought in which he discusses, amongst other things, the development that led to the creation of Equitable Life and the birth of modern life assurance, which is what we discuss on this episode.



In this episode we discuss:

  • What life assurance looked like in the 1700s compared to what we know it as in the present.
  • How statistics and probability theory helped develop modern life assurance
  • The role James Dodson and the idea of a lifetime policy played in modern life assurance
  • How Equitable Life was founded using Dodson's ideas in 1762
  • How life assurance has developed in the years since


We hope you enjoy the episode, if you did please subscribe to stay up to date with future episodes.

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