Connie Valencia is a dynamic speaker and risk and strategy advisory specialized in governance, risk and compliance. She is a principal of Elevate Consult, a premier advisory firm specialized in: Risk Management, IT & Business Process Assurance and IT & Finance Transformation services.

In addition to serving her clients and continuously building her business, Connie is leading a team that is incubating the next evolutionary steps to Risk Management. By leveraging artificial intelligence, companies can identify and understand the compounding impacts that certain risk patterns have on achieving their strategic goals.

This new approach was successfully piloted with a global humanitarian organization. Based on the results of the risk pattern analysis, the organization modified their approach to respond to all risks included in their 'dangerous risk patterns'. Prior to the analysis, the organization was only focused on the 'top risks' as deemed by the executives.

Connie and team had a successful unveiling of this new risk management approach at the IIA General Audit Manger's conference in March 2011.In addition, she has been asked to serve on the IIA ERM Certification committee. The IIA is striving to launch an ERM Certification for Risk Management professionals by 2012. In addition, Connie is also negotiating an exclusive publishing deal with a large national publisher to design an interactive risk management platform to be released early next year.

Prior to joining Elevate, Connie served in leadership roles as Director of Internal Audit for a $2B Real Estate / Assessment Management Firm as well as Practice Leader over the Advisory Services for the South Florida offices of Grant Thornton.

Connie began her career with Arthur Andersen serving the Audit and Assurance Services practice.

She is also a board member and former (2 term) president of the Miami Chapter for the IIA. She is a Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) and has her Certification in Controls Self Assessment (CCSA).