In 1982, this was still a genuine question. Life insurance and banking were distinct markets, each operating with distinct knowledge machineries and distinct systems of supervision. The management of Hambro Life, a relative newcomer to the market, however, thought differently. The company was founded in 1970 by the South African insurance entrepreneur Mark Weinberg, who in 1961 had already successfully set up another company, Abbey Life. Both companies had gained substantial market share by aggressively competing in the market using a large direct sales force. Yet, maintaining such a large sales force – Hambro Life employed over 3,000 sales agents in 1982 – was also expensive. Weinberg therefore envisioned Hambro Life expanding its business operations in a market for financial services at large. ‘We feel very strongly that the dividing lines between various financial institutions are going to break down’, he was reported saying by a Financial Times reporter. ‘We are in a strong position to make our life assurance company the hub of an integrated financial services operation on a lower cost basis than either a clearing bank or a building society which have to carry very large high street branch networks’ (Hall, 1982).

Regardless of how successful Weinberg's efforts to integrate insurance and banking services were or not, what matters here is that Weinberg perceived life insurance predominantly as a financial service. In so doing, Weinberg's ideas about life insurance differed quite substantially from what would have counted as actuarial orthodoxy at the time and the idea that life insurance operated on a different, incommensurable logic relative to finance.