In March 2020, the UK’s tax department HMRC was faced with a complex problem: how to improve the accuracy, reliability, and truth of information about customer activities, in order to counter fraud AND adapt to the speeds that the situation required, ensuring that every claim was reviewed in 72 hrs?

As the UK government announced statutory sick pay, a job retention scheme, and self-employment income support, the Customer Insights team at HMRC began to transform the Customer Insights Platform (CIP).

CIP is an internal platform built on top of AWS, which provides highly available transaction monitoring and auditing to internal customers across HMRC. This session tells the story of how the Customer Insights team transformed CIP from data storage to data product capabilities and built an intelligent risking service to bake automated risking decisions into customer activities.

Millions of claims were submitted by taxpayers, and every single one was automatically assessed for fraud detection, supporting the work that HMRC fraud investigators were doing in very difficult circumstances. This was a revolution in the speed of data analysis within HMRC. Meanwhile, the thinking of the Customer Insights team was transformed, from data storage to data as a product at scale.

This session will include details of CIP architecture, the delivery mindset of the customer insights team, and working practices that delivered such successful outcomes that the Customer Insights team received a personal note of gratitude from the Prime Minister, and CIP became a multi-award winning platform at the 2021 UK IT awards.