Blue solution to white-collar slog will spark a fever

THE fund manager chuckled into his lunch. As payback for the bill, I’d asked for the best stock we could recommend to our readers.

“You’ve already missed it,” he chortled. “Blue Prism. Best share of my career.”

To my shame, I’d never heard of the thing. But this tech star had quietly been taking the junior AIM by storm. As my lunch companion pointed out, since he bought in two years earlier, the shares had gone from 121p to £14.

He said we’d missed the boat, but, undaunted, we profiled the chief executive, Alastair Bathgate, a couple of weeks later. That was in January. Since then, the shares have shot up another 30%.

So, what does Blue Prism do? Using superfast computing power, it automates the dullest white-collar jobs. Robotic Process Automation software, to use the jargon, carries out routine administration tasks for big companies.

As well as automating boring jobs, it can cope with rapid, massive rushes of work: imagine how useful that can be for financial services firms in the Isa season, or for fashion giants when new ranges hit the shelves. If your existing Blue Prism robots run out of capacity, you just license more.

The RPA market is growing exponentially as multinationals cotton on to the savings they can make, which allow them to spend more of their wage bill on product design than paperwork. Yet it is dominated by just three small players, of which Blue Prism is the only one on the stock market.

Its figures today speak volumes: in the first half of last year, it won

209 new customers. In the first six months of this year, it gained 559.

Not only has it more than doubled the number of new customers, but