Abstract: In recent years, the rapid expansion and growth of the bank-related insurance companies is attracting the attention of the business circle and has become the “Redeemer” in the development of bank insurance industry in China. Under such conditions, this paper focuses on the operating efficiency of the bank-related insurance companies as well as their influencing factors and discusses whether the reason for their rapid development lies in the background of bank shareholders. The empirical result of the DEA efficiency from the samples of 10 bank-related and 12 non-bank-related life insurance companies from 2010 to 2015 shows that in average the operating efficiency of the bank-related life insurance companies is still lower than that of non-bank-related life insurance companies, but the gap between them is shrinking. Among the bank-related life insurance companies, the operating efficiency of the life insurance companies directly controlled by banks is higher than that of life insurance companies controlled by financial groups that are directed by banks. The bank-related life insurance companies present an overall feature of increasing returns to scale, while the non-bank-related life insurance companies present an overall feature of decreasing returns to scale. Against the above mentioned differences between the operating efficiencies, this paper further makes an empirical analysis with the Tobit regression. The findings show that there is a positive relation between the operating efficiency and such factors as the degree of bank insurance specialization, the nature and the size of the companies, and so on, while the impact of such factors as shareholders’ background, the years of establishment, etc. on the operating efficiency has not been verified.

Key words: bank insurance; bank-related life insurance company; operating efficiency