An accountant who builds automation. Not the other way round.

Bluequill is run by Nathan Smith, a chartered certified accountant (ACCA, qualified 2007) who has spent the last several years at the sharp end of finance and regulatory automation.

Nathan led the regulatory-reporting automation programme at a fast-growing UK SME bank, taking it from a board-level aspiration to a fully automated function in eighteen months — building the ETL dashboards, writing the SQL that pulled and shaped the data from the warehouse, integrating the vendor platform, and running the plan that kept it on track. Before that he spent two years as a consultant with one of the UK’s largest regulatory-automation solution providers, and more than a year configuring automated Bank of England reporting at a well-known UK challenger bank.

The common thread: getting numbers out of the systems where they live, into the shape a regulator or a board needs, without people re-keying them — and doing it in a way that stands up to audit.

Bluequill brings that discipline to growing businesses that don’t have a bank’s change budget. The methods are the same; the tools are cheaper and faster than they were even two years ago, and AI now handles the judgement-heavy steps that used to make automation impractical for smaller finance teams. Nathan has completed formal AI training with The Knowledge Academy and works day-to-day with Anthropic’s Claude as an operating partner — planning, building, testing and documenting alongside it — which is why Bluequill can deliver in weeks what used to take quarters, and why he can explain, in plain terms, exactly what the AI in your process is and isn’t doing.

He is based in Bournemouth, works with clients across the UK, and when he isn’t automating something can usually be found in the gym or on a golf course, where he plays to a decent standard and is happy to be asked about it.