Suomi.fi Messages improved Kela's customer communications and brought savings

​​​​​​​The digitalisation of customer mail has been a long-developed project of Kela, which has sought to balance smoothness, reliability and cost-effectiveness. At Kela, this digitalisation has both improved accessibility and brought substantial savings.

As a result of the legislative amendments in 2026, Finland is transitioning to digital official communications In the future, Suomi.fi Messages will be activated for adults who log in to an authority's e-service.

Kela is also moving away from mailing paper documents, and in summer 2025, Kela deployed Suomi.fi Messages to support this goal. Now, Kela's customers are notified of the arrival of new documents through a familiar service.

– Above all, the transition to paperless decisions and Suomi.fi Messages makes communication more efficient, and it's a natural step in this day and age, says Anu Lantonen, Head of Section at Kela's Benefit Document Production.

At the end of 2025, 1.5 million Kela customers had already opted for paperless communication. More than 60% of all benefits documents sent by Kela were only submitted to the OmaKela e-service, i.e. digitally. 

Suomi.fi Messages as part of the whole

It has been possible to view documents in Kela's e-service for a long time. 

The actual paperless decision, in which the document is no longer sent by post at the customer’s request, has been in use at Kela since the early 2020s. From 2024 onward, almost all Kela benefits documents have been available in digital format.

– Kela has worked towards paperless decisions gradually for several years, says Lantonen.

Suomi.fi Messages was introduced at Kela in summer 2025. It was first deployed in systems where customer benefit decisions are made.

Kela started to phase out paper mail already in January 2026. This was possible due to Kela’s special legislation. In Kela's implementation, the system interprets the customer as the user of the paperless decision when they log in to OmaKela and have provided their electronic contact details. 
If the customer has also activated Suomi.fi Messages, they will get a notification in Suomi.fi Messages when a new document arrives in OmaKela. In other cases, Kela sends the message to the customer itself.

– The introduction of Suomi.fi Messages has been surprisingly smooth thanks to the ready-made API. At first, we were a bit concerned about the large volumes of messages, but everything has worked very well, Lantonen says.

In Suomi.fi Messages, large volumes of data flow reliably

Using Suomi.fi Messages brings many benefits to an organisation like Kela, whose communication volumes are high. Kela sends more than 14 million documents each year, and 100,000 of them can be sent at once.

– In such volumes, the reliability of the messaging service is highlighted. We have notified DVV in advance of larger message clusters, Lantonen says.

From the customer's perspective, it is also an advantage that only approved authorities or other public actors can send electronic messages to Suomi.fi Messages. This makes it safe to send and receive links in Suomi.fi Messages, and they always direct the customer to the correct official service. On the other hand, for security reasons, email notifications from Suomi.fi or email messages from Kela never contain links that the user is prompted to click on.