Building a Design System for Scale for a Global Healthcare and Insurance Provider - Helium

OVERVIEW

A global healthcare and insurance provider was building across siloed teams — and the cracks were showing. Inconsistent design practices, duplicated components and faltering governance were slowing delivery and fragmenting the customer experience. Omnia was brought in to build the design system foundation they needed to scale.

Client Story

Strategy and Priorities:

Establish a single, centralised design system that delivery teams would actually adopt — ending siloed builds, duplicated components and uneven customer experiences across digital channels.

Modernize the retail banking experience to retain younger demographics and increase daily app engagement.

Digital Priorities:

Create a scalable contribution model with governance rituals and embedded design expertise — so teams could co-create components without losing consistency or quality.

Shift from a purely transactional utility to a proactive financial advisory tool.

The Challenge:

Fragmented digital channels, no shared governance, and previous design system attempts that had failed to gain traction — leaving delivery teams to build in silos at increasing cost.

Our Collaboration:

Omnia ran practice reviews, shaped the vision, validated with users and embedded designers inside product squads — building the system and the operating model to sustain it.

We partnered with the bank’s digital and data science teams to design and validate an AI-driven homepage that anticipates user needs and provides tailored financial guidance.

CONTEXT

The Challenge

With no centralised design system in place, delivery teams defaulted to building in silos — producing inconsistent design practices, duplicated components and uneven customer experiences. Shared governance was absent, previous design system attempts had faltered through poor adoption, and the resulting reliance on bespoke approaches was driving up delivery costs and slowing speed to market. The organisation needed a system its teams would trust, contribute to and actually use.

OUR EXPERTISE

Omnia partnered with the client to establish and scale a smart design system — combining practice reviews, vision shaping, user validation and embedded design expertise to build something the organisation could own and grow.

How we helped

The Solution

Practice review against industry standards

Multi-source pipeline development

Audited existing assets, team structures, workflows and adoption models — establishing a clear baseline and identifying what was working, what wasn't and what needed to change first.

Built robust data ingestion pipelines connecting cloud platforms, CRM databases and legacy batch systems — standardising ETL/ELT processes across the organisation.

Embedding designers in product squads

Cloud data warehouse

Placed designers directly inside product teams to pilot the contribution model — giving delivery teams hands-on support and building trust in the system through shared practice.

Designed and deployed a scalable AWS and Snowflake architecture capable of processing billions of annual transactions — with optimised storage and compute separation for cost efficiency.

Governance and contribution rituals

Data model harmonisation

Defined the processes, cadences and playbacks that now guide contribution — giving teams a repeatable way to propose, build and ship new components with confidence.

Developed a high-fidelity mobile prototype featuring predictive ML spending insights, Gen-AI chat support, and dynamic UI modules.

User-centred validation

Secure data sharing

Applied heuristic evaluations and usability testing to ensure new components met real accessibility standards and customer needs before being added to the system.

Validated the AI-driven features through extensive qualitative user testing, ensuring the algorithms felt helpful rather than intrusive.

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