An insurance submission can be a peculiar measure of progress. The software is there. The email has arrived. The person who knows how to assess the risk is at work. Yet the submission still takes two hours. Somewhere between receiving information and using it, a small administrative expedition has begun.
That was the problem facing a global specialty insurer in a published Chenoa case study: scattered data, manual entry and more than 30 lines of business. Chenoa built a shared interface with Unqork and used a UiPath natural-language-processing bot to extract information from emails. The reported submission time fell to ten minutes.
- Chenoa builds enterprise software and connects the systems behind it.
- Its distinctive work combines low-code/no-code development, automation and industry knowledge.
- 3Pillar acquired the company in September 2023.
- The useful lesson: investigate the handoff before buying another tool.
The two-hour submission
Ten minutes is an appealing number. But the mechanism is more interesting than the applause. An underwriter needs usable information. If retrieving that information becomes an occupation of its own, expensive expertise spends part of the day acting as a courier. Chenoa’s intervention standardized the entry point and automated retrieval. The case also reports onboarding more than 30 products.
The bottleneck described here was the route into the decision. That distinction matters. Automating information collection and making an underwriting judgment are different jobs. The practical reading of this example is that a better route can give the expert more time for the second one.
Chenoa occupies that route. Its business is software engineering and IT consulting: commissioned products, integrations, modernization and automation for other organizations. You bring a workflow or a product problem; it supplies the engineering needed to make the parts cooperate.
A spreadsheet with too many colleagues
The same pattern appears in a Canadian multinational investment manager’s fund requests. Investment and financial-operations teams coordinated through complex spreadsheets. Risk and regulatory requirements added parameters; approvals added people. A perfectly competent spreadsheet had acquired a social life.
Chenoa built a Unqork workflow that generated request templates and sent them for approval. It connected legacy data sources and added single sign-on, bringing investment, FinOps, tax, legal and management into the process. The published case describes a four-month deployment and reductions of 80% in errors, 70% in turnaround time and 95% in request-related emails.
Those figures describe one implementation. Their larger usefulness is diagnostic: count the messages needed to complete a request. A high count may indicate that the application does not contain the process. People are carrying it in their inboxes.
That is an interpretation worth testing in your own organization. Follow one request from beginning to end. Mark every re-entry of a number, every approval and every search for the latest version. You may discover that the delay lives in the gaps between otherwise adequate tools.
No-code, with the engineering left in
In a 2021 Unqork session, Aneesh Devi divided architecture into four layers: presentation, business logic, APIs and integrations, and the data store. Unqork could serve the front end, the whole application or the back end. The choice depended on the existing technology and the enterprise’s needs. At the time, Unqork said Chenoa had built more than 25 complex, large-scale applications on its platform.
“Just because this is no-code doesn’t mean that we have walked away from good software engineering design principles.”Aneesh Devi / Unqork architecture session, 2021
This explains the company’s position in the market. A platform supplies capabilities; an implementation partner decides how those capabilities fit a particular organization. Chenoa’s pitch combines platform knowledge with experience in sectors where records, permissions and exceptions have consequences. Its public profile names AWS, Azure, Mendix and Workato alongside Unqork and UiPath.
The alternatives include building internally or hiring another systems integrator. Chenoa’s distinction is the combination demonstrated in its cases, rather than an exclusive claim to these tools. In a separate P&C insurance project, it used Unqork to bring claims, first notice of loss, signatures, policy documents and payments into a single customer portal. A policyholder could deal with one interface while the underlying systems continued doing their jobs.
The patient record has a second job
Healthcare makes the integration problem particularly visible. Chenoa’s published MediOp solution describes a platform that normalizes information arriving in different formats and connects records across systems. But successful processing still left users with manual file reviews. Chenoa added UiPath automation to identify validation issues and route them to the appropriate people.
Here, the first system solved interoperability; the work around it remained. That is a useful warning against declaring victory when data arrives. Someone must still determine whether it is usable and decide what happens when it is not. The business process extends beyond the import button.
There is a longer healthcare thread, too. In April 2014, Chenoa announced a specific ONC Health IT certification for Datapearl Business Intelligence for Healthcare 3.0. That historical analytics milestone helps explain why healthcare appears in its work alongside financial services. In 2020, the company also pledged up to $250,000 in pro bono software services for nonprofits fighting COVID-19.
What 3Pillar bought
Founded in 1998 by Raj Devi and Niku Trivedi, Chenoa had accumulated a practice that appealed to a larger product-development company. On September 6, 2023, 3Pillar announced the acquisition, pointing to low-code/no-code capabilities and banking, financial-services and insurance expertise. The announcement said Chenoa would add 425 team members.
The founders’ public rationale was greater reach, resources and product capabilities. The deal makes sense as a capability purchase: Chenoa brought experience in rapid application development, while the larger organization offered a broader delivery network. Its original website now directs visitors to 3Pillar. For a prospective buyer, that makes the parent company the current doorway.
Platform expertise had already earned recognition. Unqork’s 2022 awards included Chenoa’s Private Valuation Oversight application and a Company Community Hub Champion award. A joint session with Brookfield that year also discussed data integration, security and governance. These are concrete signs of participation in the platform ecosystem, more informative than a wall of technology logos.
Count the handoffs before buying the tool
The commercial question is total cost. A sensible proposal needs to account for implementation, platform licenses, integrations, support and the handling of exceptions. Minutes saved only become a persuasive investment case when the baseline is sound and the ongoing expense is understood. Treat the published cases as prompts for those questions, rather than a promised return.
The approach is most plausible when a workflow repeats, its rules can be expressed and the necessary systems can exchange information. If records are inconsistent, approvals are disputed or nobody owns the exceptions, a faster interface will still inherit the confusion. That is a practical inference from the work, not a reported Chenoa failure.
What a reader can copy is modest and useful: start with one handoff, measure it, map its rules, then decide which technology belongs there. Chenoa’s story makes administrative time visible. The glamorous part of software may be the screen. The valuable part may be the hour that quietly disappears.