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You do not necessarily need to be a super large company to make good value transformational use of digital labor. Blue Prism itself uses its own product, and we are only a 700 person organization. You can imagine lots of knowledge work taking place. Other forms of financial services and manufacturing, as well as telcos, retail, health, and health insurance are big too. Financial services, and particularly retail banking and insurance, are probably our top two verticals. What other industries have been the biggest adopters and why?īathgate: You are right. High: Financial services is a logical place to begin given the focus on and sanctity to information. Then we built the product, scaled, and then rolled out to market over the last six or seven years. In the end, that all went in the trash can and we started from scratch. The services work that we built in version 0.1 for Barclays was their code, actually. It feels like a long journey, but there have been some logical steps on the way. It is certainly not mainstream now, and it is still very early in terms of its adoption curve around the world, but at least it is a recognized category now.
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That was truly when the new category, the new market for RPA, was founded in its early days. The term robotic came from us and it became robotic process automation. RPA as a term was not coined until about 2012. Phase two was building in those capabilities to turn this into an enterprise-strength version of an RPA. Banks and other organizations have regulators that are keeping an eye on things such as the data security, transactional integrity, and all these other things that need to be built in. You need to be in control and you need some governance around it. That can lead to anarchy if you are not careful.
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We recognized that there needed to be a business-led solution to this, and this eventually became humans training software robots, as opposed to techies writing code and building systems and applications for use in the business.Īs I was looking at it from the other end of the telescope, we quickly realized that business-led is not enough. It is not that IT was obstructive, they were very helpful, but they were building the big-ticket items, and there is a certain economic granularity that comes with an IT program. They were unable to address that with traditional IT methods. The conversation that sparked Blue Prism was from the head of change there who made it clear that there was a wide unmet automation need.
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It created a lot of efficiency improvement. We had previous hands-on experience with centralizing collections and recoveries for checking accounts and personal loans into one call center in Manchester, and that exposed a number of issues. Our first customer was a bank in the UK, Barclays. He highlights all of the above in this interview.īlue Prism CEO Alastair Bathgate Credit: Blue PrismĪlastair Bathgate: Dave and I worked for another software vendor that did collections, recoveries, and functionality.
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His team has been hard at work at developing a new Digital Exchange, an RPA platform, which he believes will accomplish his ultimate mission to free makers to innovate, while positioning his company as a hub for RPA. There Blue Prism has access to great technology talent from the Manchester University, which Bathgate notes is the university where the computer was born.īathgate notes that the value proposition for RPA has changed from cost savings, largely through cutting staff to revenue enhancement. It is based in a small town in the northwest of England called Warrington. It is a British company, but it also is not based in London. This tech leader is not based in Silicon Valley nor in the US more generally. There are a number of aspects of his company that go against expectations. Blue Prism CEO Alastair Bathgate co-founded the company more than 17 and a half years ago. He was a pioneer in the robotic process automation (RPA) field before the term was coined.
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