HMRC picks Salesforce over Pega in CRM deal worth up to £2bn

On 15 October Salesforce announced that HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) had chosen it as its enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) provider, under an agreement that can run for 15 years and is worth up to £2bn. The contract started on 30 September, according to The Stack, and runs until at least September 2036, with extensions that could take it to 2041.

Including VAT, the ceiling is £2.4bn. The Register, which reported the contract award notice on 29 September, says HMRC received two final bids and chose Salesforce over Pegasystems, which sells rival customer service and automation software.

Salesforce says the new system will run on Agentforce, Public Sector Solutions and Marketing Cloud, built on its Data 360 platform, and will bring a set of legacy systems onto one platform, with a single view of each taxpayer’s contact with HMRC. Agentforce, its AI agent platform, will automate routine administration, triage inbound queries and route complex cases to specialists. Quantexa, a decision-intelligence company, will supply tools that connect data and flag patterns of fraud.

The AI and the fraud scoring are the parts that draw attention, but the term is what sets this deal apart. A software-as-a-service contract that can last 15 years ties one of the largest customer-service operations in the tax system to a single vendor’s data model, AI agents and implementation network until the early 2040s. It also gives other large CRM buyers, public and private, a reference price and a reference term that rival bids are likely to be measured against.

A platform bought for 15 years

At its full length, the agreement runs for three times as long as the five-year deal HMRC signed with Pegasystems in 2024. The Stack lists Data Cloud, Informatica and Experience Cloud among the services the contract covers, which puts data integration, the customer data layer and the self-service portals under the same supplier as the case records.

Salesforce says the tax system serves more than 34 million individuals and five million businesses, and that the platform supports HMRC’s aim to deliver 90% of its services digitally by 2030. A long term is likely to spread the cost of a migration of that size. It also means the data model HMRC builds at the start of the contract is likely to be the one its caseworkers, and the businesses that deal with them, work through for a decade or more.

What the scoring rewarded

According to CX Today’s reading of the tender documents, quality carried 70% of the evaluation, price 20% and social value 10%. When HMRC first sounded out suppliers in April 2025, it put the procurement at £1bn, The Register reported. The ceiling awarded is £2bn before VAT.

Salesforce’s release lists commitments of the kind that social value scoring covers. The company says it will allocate 15% of its professional advisory services work on the contract to small and medium-sized enterprises, and says it will widen access to AI and digital skills, including apprenticeship routes, as part of a wider commitment to train 10 million workers in AI by 2030. Zahra Bahrololoumi, president and chief executive of Salesforce’s regional business, said in the announcement: “Technology is only one part of the value this contract will deliver.”

For smaller consultancies and systems integrators that work on Salesforce, the 15% commitment sets aside a defined share of the advisory work on a contract worth up to £2bn, rather than leaving it to the prime supplier’s discretion.

Agents behind the caseworker

Salesforce describes Agentforce as assisting caseworkers inside “tightly governed workflows”, with “human oversight from trained HMRC staff” kept for every taxpayer decision. Kendall Collins, chief executive of Missionforce and Government Cloud at Salesforce, called HMRC “a global leader demonstrating what’s possible when governments embrace innovation”.

The CRM is one half of the program. HMRC has also awarded a separate contact-center contract led by Capgemini, worth up to £600m including VAT, which The Register says is meant to integrate with the new CRM. Together, the two contracts carry a ceiling of £3bn including VAT.

For Pegasystems, the result follows a five-year agreement announced in May 2024 that expanded HMRC’s use of its Customer Service and Decisioning software, as IT Brief reported at the time. Salesforce’s release on the new award does not say how that agreement sits alongside the new platform.

The last extension expires in 2041. If HMRC takes up every option, the customer records behind the tax system will run on one vendor’s data model until then, and the next large CRM award, in the public sector or out of it, is likely to be compared with £2bn over 15 years.