In our Spotlight on Success series, Brian Madonia, Senior Vice President and Head of Internal Audit at GreenSky, and Vincent Banks, Vice President of Audit at GreenSky, share how they leveraged AuditBoard’s connected platform to align on a common control language and control library, get real-time visibility into issues and remediation, and collaborate with team members and business stakeholders while remote. Watch the video and read the highlights below.
Tell us a bit about GreenSky, and how AuditBoard’s GRC platform enabled the company’s pre-IPO readiness.
“GreenSky is a software company, and they act as the middleman between merchants and bank partners. It’s a point-of-sale solution that we primarily engage between the home improvement business line and the elective healthcare business line.” – Brian Madonia, SVP and Head of Internal Audit
“Prior to using AuditBoard, we were like any traditional young company: everything was spreadsheet-driven, heavily manual processes, and certainly the idea of becoming a publicly-ready company started driving the documentation of financial reporting controls. We were kind of siloed, focusing on documenting internal controls. As any company knows, that’s really difficult to do — you need automation and efficiency because there’s a significant cost related to implementing as a publicly-traded company. We realized that everyone was speaking a different language when it came to what a control is, what a process is — and using AuditBoard to speak in a common language turned out to be an ancillary, unexpected benefit.” – Brian Madonia, SVP and Head of Internal Audit
We didn’t have electronic work papers, so we were dealing with the challenges of efficiency problems as we tried to pass workbooks back and forth via networked folders. We also had no control library for operations and compliance — only for SOX. The flexibility of AuditBoard allowed us to quickly expand our controls implementation on the operations and compliance side, and then continue the value add that we can bring to the company — more than just SOX, but also enterprise-wide controls, testing, and value-added services.” – Vincent Banks, Vice President of Internal Audit
How has AuditBoard’s WorkStream workflow solution created a strong controls environment in your organization?
“Our teams love WorkStream. It’s extremely efficient, and we leverage it for so many things: to run a Sarbanes-Oxley program, to gain competence for management, to make sure the controls are operating effectively. We’ve utilized WorkStream for the controls module, which we launch every quarter — Sarbanes-Oxley controls certifications, SOC 1, SOC 2, and then on an annual basis, we do PCI certification.It gives management on a periodic basis, if not a quarterly basis, confidence that the control has the right ownership, the right language, the right frequency, and it’s operating effectively.” – Brian Madonia, SVP and Head of Internal Audit
Tell us about your experiences using issue tracking to get real-time visibility into issues and remediation?
“Issue tracking has been a tremendous help for us because previously we were tracking our issues in spreadsheets. We were controlling a lot of the remediation process, but now that we’ve been able to get more of the operations-level individuals in AuditBoard, we’ve been able to relinquish that role. We may update the issue finding and the information in it after reporting, but now we’ve been able to assign those out to the responsible parties. For us, now we know at any given time what’s ready for testing. The AuditBoard system helps us facilitate communication and visibility each time we do our remediation program and also helps us for our quarterly reports from a compliance standpoint. It’s been so beneficial for us to have that centralized method of working through our issues.” – Vincent Banks, Vice President of Internal Audit
How has AuditBoard’s connected platform enabled your team to collaborate with team members and business stakeholders remotely?
“When we had a pandemic like COVID, we were able to show the value of AuditBoard and how we use electronic work papers to continue to be productive when we moved to a remote environment. In addition, we now utilize AuditBoard as the one source of truth that what we call the accountable executive uses to know what their controls are. That’s a pretty powerful message. Is that a dollar amount? I don’t think so. Is that a credibility amount? Absolutely.” – Brian Madonia, SVP and Head of Internal Audit
