In the latest installment of our Spotlight on Success series, Erin Banet (Chief Audit Executive) and Leah Schraudenbach (Chief Risk Officer) at Humana share how they drive collaboration and share risk data to get a holistic view of risk across the organization.
Hear how Humana’s internal audit and risk management teams empower collaboration to address risk head-on. As a result of this improved state of collaboration, Humana experienced benefits such as:
- 30% increase in SOX controls tested
- 50% increase in risk audits completed
- 20% increase in audit cycle efficiency
Describe your approach to risk management at Humana.
Leah Schraudenbach (Chief Risk Officer, Humana): “Rather than saying we eliminate risk, what we say is, let’s be risk aware. Let’s help the company develop its risk appetite. And that takes the form of a risk appetite statement. And then what we do is we go and say, are the outcomes we achieve in line with our risk appetite?”
How does connected risk play into your internal audit role?
Erin Banet (Chief Audit Executive, Humana): “Internal audit operates as a third line of defense, but we operate with our other lines of defense counterparties. The goal is to be very collaborative across each of the different lines because that helps support the broader message that we’re trying to exhibit to our board and to our leaders – that we’re all focused on risk and we’re all focused on covering that risk and ensuring that we’re doing it in a collaborative manner.”
Leah Schraudenbach (Chief Risk Officer, Humana): “We have very small teams and the only way to be efficient is to, wherever possible, share all the information that we have. If somebody comes to the second line of defense and says, is this a big risk or a small risk, they better be getting the same answer from the third line also. The smaller the group, the more efficient we are, but the higher the requirement that we share the data. And one of the ways we do that is obviously through AuditBoard.”
How would you define the role of risk management?
Leah Schraudenbach (Chief Risk Officer, Humana): “A lot of this is about understanding how our customers benefit from good risk management and taking that through the entire process regardless of whether it’s complicated, simple, it touches a customer directly, or something that we monitor to make sure that our processes are working correctly.”
Erin Banet (Chief Audit Executive, Humana): “Having the ability to cover more risk and ensuring that we can expand further is very important. Because if we’re very siloed to only being able to cover or execute on a certain number of risks, having that expanded focus allows us to do more.”
