Insurance promotes financial resilience for individuals and households, aiding them in risk management and welfare improvement. Despite concerted efforts by countries and international bodies to promote financial inclusion through various programs, the roles of life and non-life insurance remain underemphasized as measure to close the financial gap in most countries. Our research is motivated by the realization that the existing literature lacks a unified measure of financial inclusion that considers the impact of life and non-life insurance. The objective of this study is to examine the roles of insurance and banking services in financial inclusion through an innovative measure. This study employs Principal Component Analysis to compute different sets of a multidimensional Financial Inclusion Index (FI index) that incorporate banking, life, and non-life insurance indicators for 72 countries from 2015 to 2019. When the role of life insurance is considered, some countries experience significant leaps in their financial inclusion levels, while the opposite holds true for most countries regardless of their developmental stage. In the meantime, non-life insurance has a strong positive impact on the overall financial inclusivity of the sample countries, with more than half of them recording higher financial inclusion. These results necessitate a reevaluation of financial inclusion strategies worldwide. We advocate for a more comprehensive approach that integrates insurance services into the financial system alongside traditional banking, especially non-life insurance given its significant contribution in enabling financial inclusion.

This paper contributes to the existing literature by examining the efficiency and competitiveness of the Takaful insurance. We employ the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compute the efficiency of Takaful operators, while Panzar-Rosse (P-R) H-statistic method is used to evaluate the degree of competition. The findings indicate that the inefficiency in Takaful’s operations is affected by the scale of operations but not by inefficiency in managerial practice. Actuaries need to pay attention to estimating provisions for outstanding claims, as this factor is negatively influencing the efficiency of Takaful insurance. Additionally, the managers are cautioned not to overspend on commissions paid to the agents because this will reduce the profit of the Takaful operators. The findings to a very large extent indicate that improvement in efficiency will increase the entry of a more viable competitor to participate in the Takaful industry. The regulators need to implement prudent monitoring of the operations of Takaful insurers because improvements in efficiency will make Takaful operators more competitive. The implications further shed light on the motivation for insurance firms to improve efficiency that enable them to charge lower price to enhance competition which may benefit both the firms and customers.