A platform that couldn't keep up
RIFT has been processing tax rebates since 1999 - over £281 million returned to more than 160,000 customers across the Armed Forces, Construction, Oil and Gas and Security sectors.
Their customer portal, MyRIFT, had been built on Ruby on Rails some years earlier. It worked, technically. But the framework version was out of date, the codebase had become difficult to change without something else breaking, and customers were stuck with an experience that didn't let them do much for themselves.
Meanwhile, RIFT's data lived across multiple poorly structured stores. This made it hard to get a reliable picture of any given customer or claim. None of this happened overnight. It crept up, as it does, while the team was busy running a real business.
Stabilise first, then modernise
We started by getting the existing Rails application into a safe state.
That meant upgrading to the latest version of Ruby on Rails. Not glamorous work, but necessary - an outdated framework is a security risk, and you're fighting the tooling every time you try to build something new. We needed a stable foundation before anything else made sense.
From there, we focused on the self-service experience. The old portal was essentially read-only for customers. We rebuilt it so people could manage their claims, upload documents, and track progress without needing to call someone.
Alongside that, we ran a separate data consolidation project - replacing RIFT's patchwork of aging data stores with a single, unified Data API. One source of truth for all customer and claim data, designed so their other systems (and any future apps) could plug into it cleanly. This kind of legacy system modernisation is rarely glamorous, but it's where the real value is.
The data piece was probably the most consequential decision we made. We could've patched the existing stores and moved on - it would've been faster. But the inconsistencies were causing real problems: duplicate records, conflicting claim statuses, manual reconciliation that ate up staff time. Building the API took longer upfront, but it gave RIFT something they could actually trust.
What changed?
After launch, claim submissions jumped 192%, unique sign-ins rose 84%, and data accuracy on essential claim information hit over 99%.
The self-service features meant customers were engaging with the platform directly instead of relying on phone calls and emails - which freed up RIFT's team to focus on the complex cases that actually needed human attention.
It's one of those projects where the real win isn't any single metric. It's that RIFT now has a platform they can build on, instead of one they're working around.
Dealing with a legacy Ruby on Rails application? See how our modernisation process works.
Calm, measured and pragmatic
“BitBrawn have been brilliant for RIFT; they have led numerous successful web application development projects, and their calm, measured and pragmatic approach immediately instils confidence. They understand the business issues we’re trying to solve and develop practical solutions to drive us forwards.”
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