Omne by FWD

The problem

An insurance app is opened twice: once at sign-up, and once at the worst moment of someone’s year. Everything in between is silence, which is an awkward foundation for a relationship meant to last decades.

Omne is FWD’s answer to that. Not a policy viewer with a claims form bolted on, but a daily app that happens to hold your insurance - fitness, guided meditation, mini-games, health tracking and claims servicing in one place, across nine markets in Asia.

Objectives

Four things the product had to do, none of them a screen:

• Make a claim something a person can finish in one sitting, rather than a correspondence conducted over days.
• Give the app a reason to be opened on an ordinary day, not only on the worst one.
• Hold one coherent experience across nine markets with different products, languages and regulators behind them.
• Turn health and wellbeing from a marketing line into something the app could actually measure and reflect back.

What I did

Two things, of different shapes. I led the Corporate Wellness programme for the app, and I was the designer on the investment segment - the part of the product where the numbers on screen are someone's actual money.

Both meant working directly with business analysts, product owners and stakeholders rather than through a brief. My work centred on the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan and Malaysia, each with its own products, regulators and expectations of what an insurer is for.

The day-to-day was UX/UI in Figma - wireframes, prototypes and high-fidelity design. The collaboration was genuinely distributed, across several countries and time zones, so identifying what users needed and then getting that agreed across the group was as much of the work as designing the answer.

Design process

I produced wireframes, prototypes and high-fidelity designs in Figma, working towards solutions that were intuitive first and attractive second - in a category where a confusing screen is not merely annoying but genuinely costly to the person using it.

Claims was the clearest example. What had been a correspondence became a three-step submission, with the document read by OCR rather than re-typed, and status visible in the app instead of chased by phone. The design work was mostly in deciding what a person should be asked at the moment they are least able to answer carefully.

The wellbeing side went the other way: short, repeatable, and rewarded. Guided breathing and sleep sessions, fitness videos cut to three, six and nine minutes, and points earned through challenges and mini-games that could be spent - including on adopting a tree.

Outcome

Omne shipped across nine FWD markets - Thailand, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Hong Kong and Macau, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam - as one app rather than nine.

Claims approval and payment run in about thirty seconds, credited straight to the customer’s bank account. Health scores are read through facial recognition, covering movement, sleep, BMI and stress.

Within a year of launch the app was carrying 55% of total transactions in FWD Thailand and the Philippines. FWD put Omne forward for the 2024 Insurer Innovation Award.