The banking book is called "The Most Fun I Never Want To Have Again: A Mid-Life Crisis in Community Banking"[0] and it tells the story of an attempted bank startup in Georgia just before the financial crisis. It has a very clear explanation of the bank business model and how small banks make money. One of the surprising things I took away from it is that bank founders think of starting a bank in ways that are very similar to how tech founders think of starting of company. The main difference is that the bank business model is already well understood to those in the industry and success depends much more on your positioning in the market than it does on innovation.
The insurance book is called "Risk & Reward: An Inside View of the Property/Casualty Insurance Business"[1] and is by Stephen Catlin, who founded an insurance company that he grew to several thousand employees with offices around the world and later sold for $4 billion. Very UK centered since that's mostly where his career took place but I don't think the fundamentals of the industry change that much around the world. Pretty detailed on the mechanics of how insurance underwriting works and what insurance underwriters think about when pricing risk. Made me realize insurance is much more like trading than I'd previously thought.