The book aims at presenting technical and financial features of life insurance, non-life insurance, pension plans. The book has been planned assuming non-actuarial readers as its "natural" target, namely - advanced undergraduate and graduate students in Economics, Business and Finance; - professionals and technicians operating in Insurance and pension areas, whose job may regard investments, risk analysis, financial reporting, etc, and hence implies a communication with actuarial professionals and managers. Given the assumed target, the book focuses on technical and financial aspects of insurance, however avoiding the use of complex mathematical tools. In this sense, the book can be placed at some "midpoint" of the existing literature, part of which adopts more formal approaches to insurance problems implying the use of non-elementary mathematics, whereas another part addresses practical questions totally avoiding even simple mathematical tools (which, in our opinion, can conversely provide effective tools for presenting technical and financial features of the insurance business)