LocalTapiola

LocalTapiola is a Finnish mutual insurer and wealth manager owned by its 1.6 million customers. The company’s guiding ethos, ‘elämänturva’ (Finnish for ‘lifelong security’), extends well beyond insurance, encompassing health, finance, and wellbeing across every stage of life. In 2018, LocalTapiola embarked on a core system renewal, overhauling online self-services for private customers, from first notice of loss to purchase, as the first phase of a broader, multi-year transformation. Alongside the new core system, several parallel initiatives were set in motion: a mobile app, a design system, and ultimately a brand refresh, complete with a custom typeface and a witty illustrative style. The brand has since continued to evolve through successive iterations.

Typeface by Kostas Bartsokas
Illustration by La Boca

Central to the services renewal was the development of a design system, aptly named Duet, catering to the company’s two brands, LocalTapiola and Turva. With multiple vendors working across disparate technology stacks, the system was designed to be framework-agnostic from the outset, built on standardised web platform APIs and Web Components. Duet was an early pioneer in technology-agnostic design systems and has since become a widely referenced model in the field.

Design System by Ariel Salminen