Two Scottish Presbyterian clergymen, Alexander Webster and Robert Wallace, decided to found an insurance company that would provide financial coverage for the widows of deceased clergymen. To calculate insurance premiums, they laid the foundations of modern statistics, leveraging the recent discoveries of Jacob Bernoulli. Today, Scottish Widows is one of the largest insurance companies in the world, with assets exceeding $100 billion (and of course, it no longer insures only the widows of Scottish clergymen…).
