Onlia

The Problem

Insurance is increasingly bundled into other products and services. Dutch insurance provider Achmea International could see the future clearly: if all you sell is a policy, you become invisible - a line item inside someone else’s product, disconnected from the customer entirely. Achmea needed to move beyond insurance to stay relevant. But the leadership team across its operating companies had no shared vision for what that looked like, no aligned proposition and no brand that could carry a new kind of relationship with customers.

The Solution

We designed and ran workshops with senior leaders from Achmea’s operating companies - not to present a brand to them, but to build one with them. The sessions developed early product and service concepts that directly informed the final offer. From that work we created Onlia: a brand built around asking customers to share their dreams and ambitions, not just their risk profiles. Putting that conversation at the heart of the brand gave Onlia genuine insight into where to build higher-value products, services and partnerships. Customers got a powerful organisation in their corner. Onlia got a relationship worth more than a premium.

Onlia launched with a stated purpose: make Canada’s roads safer. The shift from insurance as penalty to insurance as reward and positive force was the brand idea made tangible.

The Impact

Onlia became one of Canada’s fastest-growing digital insurance companies. The brand was strong enough that Fairfax, Achmea International’s partner, agreed a joint venture to roll out Onlia globally. That’s the commercial test of a brand: not whether it looks good, but whether it’s investable enough for a global partner to bet on scaling it across markets. Accidents became ambitions. Products became conversations. A traditional insurer became a digital startup with international expansion built into the model from day one.