NN Group Brand Guidelines: Zutphen 1845, an Orange N From 1970 & a 2014 Listing

Zutphen, Rotterdam and a merger in 1963.

NN Group traces its roots to two Dutch insurers. The company’s history page says that in 1845 two cousins founded De Nederlanden van 1845, a fire insurer, in Zutphen; Dutch Wikipedia names them as Gerrit Jan Dercksen and Christiaan Marianus Henny and says the company took its final form in 1888, when a fire insurer and a reinsurer they had set up were joined under the 1845 name. The second root, the Nationale Levensverzekering-Bank, was founded in Rotterdam in 1863 as a life insurer. NN says Nationale introduced the first collective pension scheme in the Netherlands in 1880, for the staff of a yeast and spirits factory, and that De Nederlanden opened its first foreign agency in Batavia, now Jakarta, in 1857.

Design entered the story early. Under Carel Henny, Dutch Wikipedia says, De Nederlanden became an important patron of the architect H.P. Berlage, who built its office on the Kerkplein in The Hague in 1897 and further offices in Amsterdam and The Hague. Dutch Wikipedia calls these buildings a prelude to Berlage’s stock exchange in Amsterdam. NN says the company moved its headquarters to The Hague in 1913.

The Second World War hit both firms. Dutch Wikipedia says De Nederlanden first named its office in the Dutch East Indies as a temporary head office and, after the Japanese invasion there, moved it to Curaçao, running its business in England, America and South Africa from there; in The Hague, part of its Groenhovenstraat office was demolished on the orders of the German occupiers to clear a field of fire for the Atlantic Wall. NN’s own history says offices of both companies were bombed and destroyed, that the Nazis forced Jewish citizens to surrender their life insurance policies, and that after the war payments to the policyholders concerned were delayed. In 1999, it says, NN and other Dutch insurers helped set up a fund to provide reparations to the Jewish community.

Nationale-Nederlanden, ING and NN.

In 1963 the two companies merged to form Nationale-Nederlanden. Dutch Wikipedia says they at first kept working under their own names and were formally combined in 1970, when the life businesses joined in one company and the non-life companies, among them De Nederlanden van 1845, Fatum and Labor, in another. The hyphen in the new name, it adds, shows that the two words are shortenings of the old names rather than an adjective and a noun. NN says the company sped up its expansion abroad from the 1960s, buying businesses in North America and Australia, and opened offices in Spain and Greece in the 1970s and 1980s; it also says it was the first European insurer admitted to the Japanese market.

In 1991 Nationale-Nederlanden merged with NMB Postbank Groep to form the ING Group. After the 2008 financial crisis ING received support from the Dutch state, and, NN says, the European Commission required it to separate its banking and insurance businesses. The European and Japanese insurance and investment businesses were placed in NN Group, which listed on Euronext Amsterdam on 2 July 2014; Dutch Wikipedia says ING sold its last remaining stake in April 2016.

As an independent company NN grew at home. Dutch Wikipedia says it completed the takeover of the insurer Delta Lloyd on 31 May 2017 and the purchase of VIVAT’s non-life business in April 2020, and English Wikipedia says the asset manager NN Investment Partners was sold to Goldman Sachs in April 2022. In January 2024 NN reached a settlement with claimant organisations, among them the Consumentenbond, over unit-linked insurance policies, and in October 2025 the Nederlands Dagblad reported that the settlement had become final, with the groups’ legal proceedings halted. The head office is in The Hague, and the company keeps a large office in Rotterdam’s Delftse Poort tower.

Design and documentation.

European insurers sell something that cannot be seen or held, so their identities do a great deal of the work. Many rely on a short wordmark or a simple symbol, often drawn in a single strong colour such as orange, blue, red or green, and repeated on offices, apps, letters and roadside-assistance vans. Several of these marks have been redrawn in recent years with softer shapes, lowercase letters or brighter tones meant to read well on small screens.

The language tends to be plain. Product pages for home, car, life and pension cover usually lead with short sentences about what is included, what a customer can expect when making a claim and how to get in touch, and campaign lines often speak directly to the reader. Photography leans towards customers, families, homes and everyday moments rather than abstract imagery, and many groups add illustration systems and short animations to explain how a policy or pension works.

Sponsorship is another common thread. Insurers attach their names to running events, football teams, sailing races, stadiums, music festivals and museums, which puts the colour and symbol in front of large audiences far from any policy document. Some also run foundations or corporate art collections that hold exhibitions under the group name.

The paperwork matters too. Listed insurers publish annual reports, sustainability reports and investor presentations that follow the same typography and colour rules as their marketing, and these documents are often the clearest public record of how a brand is applied in long-form layouts, charts and tables. For a designer, the useful lessons sit in that consistency: one mark, a short palette and a calm, readable voice used across many countries and channels.

An orange N and the line “You matter.”

The company’s visual history turns on one letter. NN’s history page says Nationale-Nederlanden introduced its orange N logo in 1970, and that the rebranding gave it more visibility through advertising and sport. Dutch Wikipedia notes that the company’s own logo spells the name in lowercase, as “nationale nederlanden.” Today NN Group uses two main brands, its website says: Nationale-Nederlanden in the Netherlands, Poland and Spain, and NN for its other international insurance businesses, in countries such as Belgium, Greece, Japan and Romania. Other names in the group include OHRA, Movir, AZL and BeFrank, plus ABN AMRO Verzekeringen, a joint venture with ABN AMRO Bank.

The voice is built around a phrase. NN says it wants to be known as the “You matter” company, and lists its values as care, clear and commit. Sport has long carried the orange: NN says Nationale-Nederlanden became sponsor of the Dutch national football team in 1992, while Dutch Wikipedia gives the years 1988 to 2009. Since 2015, the company says, its sports sponsorship has centred on running, with title partnerships of the NN Marathon Rotterdam, the NN CPC Loop in The Hague and the Dam tot Damloop; it launched the NN Running Team in 2017 and, from 1 January 2026, became founding partner of what is now the dsm-firmenich Running Team.

Culture is the other side. NN says its art collection holds more than 1,500 works shown in its Dutch offices, and that it has given the NN Art Award each year since 2017 to an artist trained in the Netherlands, presented at Art Rotterdam. It is main partner of the Kunsthal Rotterdam and a partner of the Mauritshuis, both since 2016, and naming partner of the NN North Sea Jazz Festival.

For a design guide, NN Group shows how a single letter and one colour can carry a company through mergers and name changes. Compare Aegon, another insurer based in The Hague, and Ageas, a Brussels-based insurer. For this guide we use a warm orange with deep navy, sand and a pale peach and a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep NN Group’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.