RPA PIONEER
Blue Prism opens local office in Cape Town Robotic Process Automation (RPA) pioneer and market leader UK firm Blue Prism has opened a local office in Cape Town, formalising its presence in South Africa where it has been working since 2016
2ND QUARTER 2020
THE FIRM develops digital workforces for enterprise – which are available in the cloud, on-premise or as integrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution – which automate complex end-to-end processes that drive digital transformation. Speaking on the sidelines of Blue Prism’s launch event held in Cape Town on 12 March, Blue Prism CEO EMEA Brian Mort said the company does a lot of business in South Africa, making it the best place for the firm to be based in on the continent. He pointed out that the company’s customers and partners in the country include PwC, IBM, Accenture, E&Y as well as Cape Town based firms DigiBlu and Clevva. Blue Prism’s other clients include Old Mutual, Nedbank and the First Rand Group. “We’ve had customers here (in South Africa) for a long time now. With over 30 large customers in the region, arguably we should have been here a little while ago but it’s a good time now because our customers are
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growing fast, the adoption of this technology and this industry space is multi-billion size and it’s only growing 100% year-on-year really over the next two or three years,” said Mort. Mort pointed out that the company – which was founded by two former Barclays Bank employees in 2001 – has grown 100% year-on-year in the last five years, growing from about 200 employees to over 1 000 in the last 18 months. “We serve customers in a 140 different countries in virtually every industry. The dominant ones are banking, finance, insurance, telco markets – that would probably make up about 40% of all of our global turnovers, but every other industry as well, including medical and certainly in South Africa mining is another big area for us,” he added. Most big companies in the world, he said, have adopted some kind of automation strategy, with many currently going through their first phase before they grow.
