The Insurance Gap in Italy: A Macro-Comparative and Micro-Empirical Analysis in the Context of Bancassurance

Despite ranking among the largest European economies, Italy continues to display a comparatively low level of insurance coverage, particularly in the non-life segment, leaving households exposed to risks that elsewhere are routinely transferred to insurers. This thesis investigates the determinants of insurance adoption in Italy through a two- level research design that keeps a macro and a micro perspective deliberately distinct. At the macro level, it situates Italy within the European landscape, comparing insurance penetration and density in order to characterise the structural gap that motivates the analysis. At the micro level, it conducts an empirical study based on aggregated and anonymised customer data provided by Banca Mediolanum, a leading Italian bancassurance institution, in which each observation corresponds to a demographic and financial profile weighted by the number of clients it represents. A frequency-weighted probit model is estimated and interpreted through average marginal effects (AME). The results indicate that education, age band, profession, geographic area and wealth class also exert statistically significant effects. Two findings stand out: a counterintuitive negative association between the highest wealth classes and insurance adoption, interpreted as a possible signal of self-insurance, and a positive association between the holding of other financial products and insurance ownership, consistent with cross-selling dynamics and broader financial engagement. These quanti- tative findings are complemented by a semi-structured questionnaire administered to some experts in the bancassurance field of Mediolanum, in particular Carmine Romano, Head of Non-Life Bancassurance Services Development, and Lorena Zurru, Product Manager, which offers a qualitative reading of the patterns. The integration of com- parative, empirical and qualitative evidence constitutes the main contribution of this work, providing a richer and more articulated account of why insurance adoption in Italy remains limited.