Software development at cloudandthings.io

Preparing for upcoming legislation changes to retirement annuities.

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In 2024, South Africa is undergoing a significant reform to its retirement savings framework with the introduction of the new Two-Pot Retirement System. Here’s an overview of what this new system entails.

The Two-Pot Retirement System is a new approach to managing retirement savings in South Africa. Under this system, retirement contributions will be split into two distinct "pots":

1. Retirement pot: This pot holds 2/3 of the contributions and is dedicated strictly to long-term savings. Funds in this pot can only be accessed at retirement.
2. Savings pot: The remaining 1/3 of the contributions are placed into this pot. Unlike the retirement pot, the savings pot allows for more flexibility. Individuals can access these funds before retirement for emergencies or other financial needs.

cloudandthings.io and Two-Pot Retirement System software development

Our team served as the key technical expertise for designing and changing the company’s various orchestration services in order to prepare for upcoming legislation changes to retirement annuities.

The client needed to quickly integrate several key systems to comply with legislative changes. Due to the complexity of these systems and data, along with the lack of existing integration with user portals like WhatsApp, the design and implementation had to be built rapidly from the ground up, while remaining flexible enough to adjust to changing requirements.

We leveraged the .NET stack and AWS infrastructure, implementing new resources to manage the anticipated surge in request volumes. This approach involved rapidly developing different components in parallel, allowing for continuous progress even as certain parts of the legislation and requirements are still being finalised.

Nine services were built, including orchestration, business rules, back-end for front-end services, data aggregation, customer request tracking and customer notifications. We also focused on the tax directive integration to SARS, tax estimates and fees calculations.

We implemented the Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) pattern to enhance the system's scalability and maintainability. By separating the commands (which modify data) from the queries (which retrieve data), we ensured that each operation could be optimised independently for better performance.

To efficiently manage high volumes of data and processing tasks, we utilised Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service). This allowed us to decouple different components of the system, enabling asynchronous processing and ensuring that our services could handle large volumes of requests without compromising on reliability or performance. The use of SQS queues not only improved the system's resilience but will also allow for smooth scaling to meet growing demand.

Our goal was to unify multiple business systems that operate with different terminologies and data formats into a single, coherent framework that is independent of the underlying systems.

Software development at cloudandthings.io

If you want to discuss any software development requirements or projects, please reach out to us via our website or e-mail us at connect@cloudandthings.io.