Power User Spotlight: JPMorgan Chase’s Kriti Shrivastava

A Project Manager for Wealth & Asset Management at JPMorgan Chase, Kriti Shrivastava discusses her transition from business analyst to a codeless developer leading a team of fellow creators. Kriti and her team were recipients of the “The Fastest App to Market” award at the Unqork Create 2022 conference. 

What was your professional experience before becoming an Unqork Creator?

Kriti: I worked predominantly as a business analyst in the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) domain. I started with insurance and worked mainly with life insurance clients in the policy administration domain. I learned that the BFSI sector has major pain points due to legacy systems that slow digital adoption. But that is just the right playground for digital and transformation opportunities.

How long have you been an Unqork Creator, and how quickly were you able to start creating?  

I started working on the Unqork platform in 2020. I didn’t have a coding background or programming knowledge, but I worked with technical strategic projects with a build timeline of three to four years. 

I have worked on Unqork on projects with similar, or even more advanced, complexity, and with Unqork we have delivered them in a matter of months. In the last three years, I have seen the platform evolve, and I have evolved with it. It is a really logical and intuitive tool.

I worked with technical strategic projects with a build timeline of three to four years. I have worked on Unqork on projects with similar, or even more advanced, complexity, and with Unqork we have delivered them in a matter of months.

Do the capabilities of the Unqork platform or in Unqork Marketplace help you think more creatively about the projects you are working on? 

They definitely do. Recently, in our company’s hackathon event, we were brainstorming ideas to automate and enhance the customer journey for fund selection and dashboarding. I came across Unqork templates for Fund Selection and Investment Management in Unqork Marketplace, and it really helped us shape our ideas and leverage the tool in a much better, much more innovative way.

Tell us about the most exciting project you have built using Unqork? 

The most exciting project, and one which I credit the most to my learning curve, is a mortgage modification workflow application, which received the Create 2022 award for “The Fastest App to Market.” 

Before, customers had to go through a very manual process of initiating a request and then filling in lots of entries on a very ugly-looking form. There were different teams involved in the approvals process, and all that was happening in a very manual way, too. Now, the whole process is streamlined and automated. 

We were very proud to deliver the project within four months. 

In your experience, is it faster to build with Unqork than it would have been with another platform (e.g. low-code or traditional code)? 

It is definitely faster to build and test with Unqork as compared to other low-code/no-code tools—and definitely much faster than traditional coding. However, anyone with knowledge of coding and who understands the logic used in low-code tools has an advantage when it comes to using the Unqork platform.  

How has Unqork changed the way you collaborate with business partners? Other developers? 

As a business analyst, I had to interact with different stakeholders—business, tech, etc., And it was often challenging to ensure that developers and the business were aligned. But with Unqork, the process becomes visual and understandable, enabling me to communicate easily with business users and collaborate with them to create better solutions and designs.

When it comes to developers, with whom we usually engage for API integrations, it has also become easier to align tech requirements and business needs using the Unqork Agile Framework templates.

What are your favorite aspects of the Unqork platform? 

First, there is the delight of previewing what we have just configured and seeing what we have created in action. The other thing is the way in which modules can be reused. Unqork offers a lot of reusability and modularity to its creators, which I feel is great.

Do you have any best practices to share with your fellow Unqork Creators? 

I would like to share two best practices. One concern is regarding storing and saving sensitive data to the Unqork platform. The other concerns securing integrations, content components, and sensitive data stored in your applications.

• Sensitive data storage. A way to keep your sensitive data secure is to use Unqork’s RBAC capabilities. Using RBAC can limit the exposure of sensitive data. Build your application so that only roles that are authorized can access sensitive data. You can control RBAC at the environment, module, and component level. That means you can customize exactly what roles have access to sensitive data. We usually restrict the data exposure by giving the right level of access, sometimes even at the component level. In addition to getting the RBAC setting right, it is very important to understand and discuss with stakeholders what data is being stored in Unqork database, for how long, and in which environment you want to store that data.
  
  
• Integration security. While doing an external integration, always try to authenticate the service/API that you are adding. This will also protect your application from external threats. You can also improve your integration security by limiting your API rate. In the API Rate Limiting settings section, you can limit the number of API requests from any single IP per server per 60 seconds. The smallest number of requests you can enter is 100, while the largest is 1,000,000. We recommend setting this to a lower number, since this reduces the likelihood of automated attacks.