Backend service for Help to Save.
| Key | Meaning |
|---|---|
| DES | Data Exchange Service (Message Bus) |
| HoD | Head Of Duty, HMRC legacy application |
| HtS | Help To Save |
| MDTP | HMRC Multi-channel Digital Tax Platform |
| NS&I | National Savings & Investments |
| UC | Universal Credit |
| WTC | Working Tax Credit |
The Prime Minister set out the government’s intention to bring forward, a new Help to Save (‘HtS’) scheme to encourage people on low incomes to build up a “rainy day” fund.
Help to Save will target working families on the lowest incomes to help them build up their savings. The scheme will be open to 3.5 million adults in receipt of Universal Credit with minimum weekly household earnings equivalent to 16 hours at the National Living Wage, or those in receipt of Working Tax Credit.
A customer can deposit up to a maximum of £50 per month in the account. It will work by providing a 50% government bonus on the highest amount saved into a HtS account. The bonus is paid after two years with an option to save for a further two years, meaning that people can save up to £2,400 and benefit from government bonuses worth up to £1,200. Savers will be able to use the funds in any way they wish. The published implementation date for this is Q2/2018, but the project will have a controlled go-live with a pilot population in Q1/2018.
The suite of repos connected with this Product are as follows:
| Repo | Description |
|---|---|
| help-to-save-frontend | handles requests from browser for public digital journey |
| help-to-save | handles backend logic for HTS |
| help-to-save-proxy | handles requests to services outside of MDTP |
| help-to-save-api | handles requests from third parties outside of MDTP |
| help-to-save-stride-frontend | handles requests from browser for internal call centre journey |
| help-to-save-stub | provides endpoints for testing |
| help-to-save-integration-tests | contains system integration tests |
| help-to-save-performance-tests | contains load performance tests |
| help-to-save-test-admin-frontend | provides useful functions for testing |
This repo is the JSON create account interface schema between HMRC and NS&I:
This diagram shows a general picture of how the different services are connected to each other:
browser - internal browser - public
call centre journey digital journey
| |
| |
| |
+------------------------+----------------------------------+-----------------------+
| MDTP | | |
| | | |
| +---------------+--------------+ +---------------+--------------+ |
| | | | | |
| | help-to-save-stride-frontend | | help-to-save-frontend | |
| | | | | |
| +---------------+--------------+ +---------------+--------------+ |
| | | |
| | | |
| +---------+ +---------+ |
| | | |
| +-------+--------------+-------+ |
| | | |
HoDs ------+--------------------------+ help-to-save | |
| | | |
| +-------+--------------+-------+ |
| | | |
| +----------+ +---------+ |
| | | |
| | | |
| +---------------+--------------+ +--------------+---------------+ |
| | | | | |
| | help-to-save-api | | help-to-save-proxy | |
| | | | | |
| +---------------+--------------+ +--------------+---------------+ |
| | | |
+-----------------------+-----------------------------------+-----------------------+
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
incoming requests requests to third-party
from third-parties services
During Private Beta, when a HtS Account is created, per-day-count and total-count counters are incremented. After the customer’s Eligibility Check, the counters are checked to ensure that the cap’s haven’t been reached. If they have, they are shuttered, otherwise they may continue to create a HtS account.
Run sbt run on the terminal to start the service. The service runs on port 7001 by default.
Run sbt test on the terminal to run the unit tests.
| Path | Method | Description |
|---|---|---|
| /eligibility-check | GET | Checks whether or not a person is eligible for help to save |
| /enrolment-status | GET | Checks whether or not a person is enrolled in help to save |
| /set-itmp-flag | GET | Sets the ITMP flag for a user to indicate they have created a HTS account |
| /store-email | GET | Stores the users new email address in persistent storage |
| /get-email | GET | Get the users email from persistent storage |
| /account-create-allowed | GET | Checks if user cap has been reached |
| /{NINO}/account | GET | Returns account data for the specified NINO, or 404 (NOT FOUND) if there is no account for that NINO |
| /{NINO}/account/transactions | GET | Returns transaction for the specified NINO, or 404 (NOT FOUND) if there is no account for that NINO |
| /create-account | POST | Created a HTS account |
| /update-email | PUT | Updates email in the HTS account |
| /paye-personal-details | GET | Gets user information for HTS |
| /validate-bank-details | POST | Checks that bank details are valid |
Service currently doesn't have a handler to manage deletions on back of account deletions in downstream systems, THALER. This causes problems when the user tries to create another account but is marked as not eligible due to account being still active in HTS system.
Till a better solution is in place to manage these deletions automatically, service currently supports this via soft deletions. This is driven by config, where a list of user NINOs are configured for either deletion or undoing of any previous deletions.
These config entries are read during application startup and processed accordingly. Processing is done by marking the enrolments
as soft-delete using a deleteFlag field on document. This approach is ideal than prefixing NINOs, as it's not ideal to mutate
keys for soft deletions, and should instead rely on fields specifically set aside for this. For audit purposes, we also log the
date on which has been taken under a field called deleteDate.
Application configuration allows following keys and corresponding values for managing deletions
-
Deletions
[{"nino": "AE123456A"}, {"nino": "BE783456A"}] -
Undo deletions
[{"nino": "AE123456A", "docID": "65745f62533fa40f2b31f763"}, {"nino": "BE783456A", "docID": "65745f62533fa40f2b31f764"}]
Approach to rely on doc id puts a dependency on knowing which of the enrolments we want to undo deletion for and make it active. This step of relying on access to live data is anyway needed with other alternate approaches (like prefixing NINOs), as prefix doesn't have context on the enrolment.
This code is open source software licensed under the Apache 2.0 License