Jack Henry & Associates, Inc. (JKHY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome, everyone. I'm Tim Chiodo. I'm the lead payments processors and fintech analyst here at UBS. We are very, very glad to be joined by the team at Jack Henry. We've got Vance, the Head of IR, here in the room as well. Vance, I want to thank you for making the trip and being a part of our conference for many years. And likewise, to Greg Adelson, who's the CEO, and is up here on stage with us. So thanks for being here. We really appreciate you making the trip to Arizona.

For sure. Thank you, Tim. Great conference, by the way.

We appreciate that. All right. So first things first. So just recently took over lead coverage of Jack Henry. Our long time and great colleague, [ Nick Crimo ] has moved on. And so I've taken over the coverage here. So I want to say a special thanks to Nick, and I'm really glad to be covering you guys. So great to be spending time here in Arizona.

Yes, for sure.

All right. We've got a great list of topics to hit here. We're going to start with the core. We're going to get into payments. We're going to get into the complementary segment. We're going to wrap up with some financial topics around margins and capital allocation. So with that, Greg, if you don't mind, we're going to start with the demand environment. Maybe talk a little bit about how you guys are seeing the demand environment today and how that changed relative to last year?

Yes. So I think let's start off that we sponsor one of our own benchmark surveys that we sent out in the early part of the year. So in early part of 2025, we sent out that survey. Then we also cosponsor one with Bank Director that went out in late July and the results came out in September. So I will say from our survey in the early part of the year, we were seeing somewhere around a 5% to 6% demand environment based on the survey results that we got. And we were starting to see that, and we kind of realized that as part of our sales pipelines and things like that. The encouraging news is that what came out in July through Bank Director, and they surveyed both banks and credit unions as well as we did, that demand environment increased to 8% to 10%. And so from our standpoint, obviously, positive news. We're starting to see that with a number of new opportunities that we've seen both from a core and across our Payments and Complementary segments as well. But as you compare that to last year, last year's environment was more like 3% to 5%. So you're seeing almost a double in the demand environment based on the surveys that we've been a part of over the last 2 years.

All right. Excellent. That was a great way to kick us off here. All right. We're going to dig in a little bit more specifically on the core segment. So typically, in a given year, Jack Henry is winning 50, give or take, cores, right? So 51 last year, targeting another 50 this year. Before we get into the forward look, can we just set the stage in terms of what do you think the annual jump ball is per year of cores that are really available to be won?

Yes. So on a typical year, and this is on average, but on average, about 200 different core decisions come. Right now, there's roughly 4,000 banks and 4,000 credit unions left. And so you see roughly about 200 of those per year that come. About 100 of them actually make a decision. So to your point, we're seeing about a 50% win rate per year for Jack Henry really over the last several years. We won 51 last year, 57 the year before that, 47 the year before that. So on average, we're more than 52 over those 3-year period. Right now, based on some news that has been played out with one of our competitors, I think that will probably increase this year and over the next several years. There's been an announcement of a consolidation of their cores. And so there's roughly 1,400-ish clients that will have a decision to make. Some of them will end up staying where they are. Some of them will end up going somewhere else, and we expect to be a winner in that as we have over the last several years at a pretty good win rate.

All right. Great. So in summary, the jump ball itself will be getting larger, and you would expect no reason to expect that your win rate would be any less. Excellent. All right. Well, that's good for that topic for now. We might circle back later. Let's talk a little bit about moving into some of the bigger banks, right? So some of the financial institutions that are maybe $1 billion or more in assets, you've been having some more success there. Maybe just talk about what's enabling that momentum.

Yes. So out of the same base of numbers that I shared earlier. So last year, we won 16 multibillion-dollar institutions. 4 of those were over $5 billion. As a comparison to the year before '13, as a comparison to the year before that, $5 billion. So we've been continuing to go upmarket. It's been a very strategic focus of ours. Some of it has been relative to the fact that our tech story is now resonating with larger institutions and giving us an opportunity and a level of credibility that maybe we didn't have in years past. We'll talk a little bit about our tech story down the road, but that has been a big driver. The other part that's been a big driver is our ability to show a level of execution that candidly, our competitors haven't been able to show through the last several years. So we look at what we call the 5 levels or 5 key words of differentiation, culture, service, innovation, strategy and execution. Those 5 words truly are things that we believe we are doing better than anybody else in the industry. And we've been able to show proof points from our execution. That in itself has lent itself for folks of larger institution size to make a decision to come to Jack Henry. Our level of transparency, our ability to do what we say we're going to do are big drivers in that.

All right. Excellent. So you just talked a little bit about your wins in cores of various sizes, some of the smaller and some of the larger. Is there a rule of thumb maybe you would share with investors how we could think about for each incremental x number of cores and what that might mean to revenue growth or flow through to earnings or anything you could kind of put a little bit of a financial set on that?

It's really difficult to put just a flat number, and I'll tell you why. So Jack Henry's largest revenue customer is our 10th largest in asset size. And a lot of it is because the core gives you an opportunity to win other complementary and payment products. So on average, when we win a credit union core, we have about 35 attached products that go to that win. If it's a banking win, it's typically around 50 different products. And so as you start to go upmarket, the best-of-suite kind of mindset becomes more of a best-of-breed. And so you get less and less tangible attachments to that. And so each deal really is contingent on which type of products they buy. Digital and payment products are way more valuable than, say, in an online account opening solution, which creates nice attach rates, but not to the same level. So every deal is treated differently. Every deal has an opportunity. Some are per account pricing, some are asset-based pricing. So it's really hard to put just a flat perspective on that.

All right. Great. I think we covered the units or the number of cores quite well. Now we're going to move on to more of the pricing. So one of the benefits that you've been seeing over time is that migration from on-prem into the private cloud, and you're about 77% of the way there, and that's a well-documented uplift in revenue that you've talked about. Maybe just recap that, but maybe more importantly, let's talk about the next shift into the public cloud and what that means for the revenue uplift.

Yes. So historically, we've seen our customers at a 77% rate move from an on-prem environment to the Jack Henry private cloud. And we see about an average of 2x the revenue when that happens. So it's roughly about 1.5 for a credit union and 2% for a bank. So truly an average of about 1.75% across the base. So we got probably a good 5-year runway left, we believe, on that, and we actually have larger customers that are moving. One proof point of that would be just in our last earnings call, we announced that we had the same number of migrations as we did the previous year, but it was at a 40% -- 60% increase in asset size. So what's left are larger customers, which again, give us a nice tailwind for that. Moving from the private cloud to the public cloud, we're already seeing with some of the modules that we've created and some of the other products is about a 20% to 25% lift from that standpoint as well. So some of the customers that end up not moving from on-prem to the private cloud and may end up going from -- you're going to see like a [ 2.25 ] opportunity there as part of that. So we're pretty -- we're very optimistic about what we think is going to be a byproduct of what we've been building and what we're already starting to see with some of the clients that have made the move.

All right. Excellent. You covered that one well. One last topic on the core segment, which is some of these recent changes that you've been talking about in terms of your sales procedures has to do with renewals. Maybe you could just expand upon this a little bit and what it means for investors.

Yes. I mean I won't get into the same level of detail publicly just from a competitive standpoint. But I will tell you this. I mean, part of it's just been we internally needed to take a different approach on how we collaborated and communicated on deals. And some of that came from a sales and operations perspective. Some of it came with how salespeople were incented. Some of it was around taking a different approach to when renewals were the timing of renewals and when we would look at actually doing a renewal early or not. Some of it is, I think, the competitive environment where we, again, believe we sit pretty much at the top at this point from a competitive standpoint. And did we need to acquiesce as much as maybe we were doing in previous years. And I think the answer has been proven out to be no. Jack Henry has a 99% client retention rate over the history of our company. We're getting ready to be a 50-year company next year, minus M&A, so minus merger and acquisitions, but we have a 99% client retention rate. And as we've made these changes, that retention rate has not changed. So as a byproduct, we as a company, are now bringing more revenue flow back into the fold. We're creating a better environment for our sales team as well to wherever they're able to kind of more negotiate with what we call a backbone, and it's been very successful. So I'm very optimistic that what we've seen over the last 6 months will continue into the near future as well and will help us with that competitive opportunity we talked about with one of our competitors.

All right. Perfect. Thank you. I should have mentioned earlier, but we will -- it looks like we're probably going to have some time at the end for audience Q&A. So if anyone would like to ask a question, I'll just bring the microphone out to you. All right. I think we covered core really well. We're going to move into the payments segment, right, your largest segment. You mentioned this earlier. It's a lot of that cross-sell and attach of additional products to your core customers. So you've got card processing, enterprise payments, PayCenter. So there's lots of payments-related businesses within this segment. Maybe you could talk a little bit about, maybe on a product-by-product basis, which ones are really driving the growth and which ones is the management team really investing behind most over the coming years?

Yes. So one other big part of that payment segment that we didn't talk about was bill pay. So bill pay has been a big part of our growth through the years. Much like bill pay is across the segment, it's more stagnated from a growth standpoint. I will tell you from a Jack Henry perspective, we've seen some nice uplift since our Payrailz acquisition, where we've been able to blend after we finished our tech kind of strategy with bringing the Payrailz and iPay solutions together, which are our 2 bill pay applications. We've seen some nice uplift so far this year since that's taken place. But to your point, the EPS business, which is remote deposit capture and ACH origination. By the way, we're the largest remote deposit capture business in the industry with close to 3,000 institutions that use that solution today. Those 2 are -- because they're more predicated on checks, -- that and bill pay are kind of leveling out, and we'll see that as more of a consistent low single-digit growth providers. From a card standpoint, we're already seeing some nice uplift in our card business this year. We reported that in Q1 earnings. Consumer sentiment is improving because when consumer sentiment improves, a large part of our card business is debit, and that's when debit is being utilized, and we're seeing a really nice uplift in our card business, along with some other things that we've added from a product standpoint. And then our PayCenter business, which is our faster payment business, which supports Zelle, the real-time payments network from The Clearing House, FedNow, things along that line and actually is getting ready to support the fourth rail of stablecoin and other things that we're going to be able to support. Those are where a lot of the growth is coming. The card business and the PayCenter business, so we've seen about 55% transactional growth over the last year. And I expect that to continue at a pretty high clip because right now, most of the faster payment industry has been focused on receive only because there's been concerns about fraud and things along that line. We've built out a faster payment module that we sell as part of our Financial Crimes Defender solution, which allows our customers to get real-time insights into fraud for Zelle, for FedNow, for RTP. And we're candidly starting to sell that like hot cakes right now, and it's really been a big driver of opportunity. Because of that, we're seeing more and more of our institutions be willing to go to Ascend environment, and that's where more money is going to be made, where business-to-business transactions can take place things along that line. So I expect our faster payments PayCenter business, along with our card business to be the really big drivers for our payments growth. And one other thing, by the way, we did announce a small, medium-sized business solution set that we rolled out. We're starting to get some nice traction. Just in the last month, we've added 280 new, what we call Tap2Local is the name of the solution. It's our merchant acquiring foray with a partnership with a company called Moov. And so I expect our SMB business and payment side to grow significantly at the latter part of this year and into the future years as we start to get more and more traction in that space, both with merchant acquiring and what we call rapid transfers, which is a real-time transfer of funds from an external account to an internal account that will allow our banks and credit unions to do things that only Chime and Bank of -- U.S. Bank and Coinbase can do today, which is Moov make money externally in real time.

Excellent. And on that acquiring offering with the partnership with Moov, fair to say that that's a little bit of rev share to Moov, a little bit of rev share to you, a little bit to the underlying FI.

That is correct. Yes. And the underlying FI's rev share comes out of Moov. So that was part of our negotiation.

All right. Perfect. All right. Let's move on to the complementary segment. So one of the big topics with this segment is Banno going outside the base, right? So becoming more of a core agnostic type product. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that. It sounds like it's something that's more of an early 2026 start to that. We'd love to hear more about that.

Yes. So part of the challenge with the delay was both getting competitive cooperation from some of that, going outside the base, takes some level of cooperation. And so the other was the level of sophistication that is part of taking Banno. So a lot of complementary and payment products have very few APIs that have to be called to be able to facilitate that. Our Banno application has over 50 that needs to be part of the integration that we believe is necessary for it to be a very successful competitive product with some of our larger digital competitors. And so part of that was building that out, building out the relationships. The other part was getting on par from a competitive feature functionality, and we believe we're there now. And so a lot of that delay was predicated on those factors. So the short answer is we are now in the process of our sales team looking for multiple opportunities for us to facilitate a digital outside the base strategy. Candidly, there's opportunities with the messaging that I said earlier with one of our competitors and the opportunities within that base as well that we'll continue to emphasize. But the other part is our full tech story and our history of Jack Henry with our ProfitStars brand was to be able to sell products inside -- outside the base. Outside the base means outside of our core client base. And so we have roughly 5,800 clients that are not Jack Henry core clients today that buy any number of products from us. So this fits right into a strategy that we've been doing for many, many years and is also part of our core modernization strategy, where we're building all of our core components to be core agnostic as well that will allow them to work with any of our competitive core providers.

All right. Excellent. Let's move on to a couple of thoughts on margins. So maybe you could talk about some of the initiatives you have ongoing, whether it's AI, maybe it's headcount related. You could also talk about any of the revenue mix shifts. What should investors be thinking about in terms of margin expansion ahead?

Yes. One thing that I want to talk about is so margin expansion, revenue expansion are big parts of how myself, our CFO and our entire executive team are compensated, and it's all based on 3-year CAGRs. So we're aligned with our investors. We believe that driving revenue growth and margin expansion are big parts of our mantra. So even literally over the last 15 years, we've been one of the leaders in process improvement initiatives across our industry. One of the little known facts is that 40% of Jack Henry Associates are trained in Lean Six Sigma Kata in the classroom, the Toyota practice. And so we've been a big, big driver of those type of initiatives for years. So now you throw AI into that. So we have over 130 different use cases today for AI across our organization that stem from everything from talent acquisition to customer service, to legal, to development and really everything in between. And so we're highly focused and our team is as well with some numbers that I've thrown out there along with Mimi, our CFO, for this year to go get. And as a byproduct of that and the process improvement initiatives that we've done over the last several years, I think it's pretty unique for us to give you this number. In the last 5 years, Jack Henry has grown their headcount by less than 1% at a time when we're growing top line revenue anywhere from 5% to 7%. So that is 100% based on the fact that we zero base every single role. We end up looking for opportunities to do more with the same through our process improvement and AI initiatives. And so those are all things that are going to continue to help drive our margin expansion as long as -- as well as other things that we're doing kind of behind the scenes with what we call product rationalization, where we're looking at a level of duplicity that we have in some of our products through acquisitions, we're an amalgamation of 50 different acquisitions. And so we've done a really good job through the years of streamlining our cores already. We only have 4 cores today. But we do have 9 different ACH platforms and 6 different wires platforms and other things that we're in the process of sunsetting and moving customers over. And as part of that process, we're going to continue to get economies of scale with how we do our development and things along that line to help drive margins.

All right. Excellent. Thank you, Greg. The last question that we have here before we move to the audience is around capital allocation. So maybe you could give a brief overview of Jack Henry's capital allocation stance. And then, of course, maybe just touch on that recent closing of the Victor Technologies acquisition.

Sure. So from a capital allocation, let's start with dividends. So we've been -- at the end of this year, we'll have 21 straight years of increasing our dividend, '22, what do you say? I thought somebody cough, 21 years of increasing our dividend. And then that's a big part of our focus and continued focus there. The other thing that we've been able to do is that we are a -- we have a fortress balance sheet with 0 debt. So a company that's $2.5 billion in revenue has 0 debt, and that is completely by design. So it allows us to do things like we're doing right now, which is continuing to buy back our stock. We're increasing our buybacks significantly from last year. We've already provided a level of guide to around $200 million, which is last year, we bought $35 million back. So this year, we are more on track to surpass that actually from where we are right now. We'll continue to do that. We'll continue to look for strategic acquisitions. As I said before, we are an amalgamation of 50 of those. But we're very focused on what those acquisitions look like, especially now. We don't have as many gaps as we once did. And so we're very focused on buying something that's public cloud native, that has a good culture, has a good team, has a good strategy. And honestly, we'll walk away from an acquisition if those things are not at the top of the list. And so you mentioned Victor Technologies, which is an acquisition we made about 60 days ago. They fit that to the T. They were public cloud native. They allowed us to build embedded finance in with our bank institutions and credit union institutions, but also allows us to diversify our revenue stream a little bit by providing these same type of services to fintechs. We don't like to compete with our customers, but we like to provide tangential services for those that they don't service themselves, and this creates the opportunity to do that. So we'll continue to look for opportunities that are specifically in payments and digital and fraud and lending are really where our focus has been. Stablecoin, as I mentioned before, is a big focus of ours. We actually have already built out a full proof of concept where we're able to do send and receive USDC. We did that in 2 weeks as part of our tech strategy, it allows us to do that. And then the other thing I want to emphasize is that there's opportunities within the stablecoin space, not only just for acquisitions, but for partnerships that will help us accelerate some of that.

All right. I think you covered it well, Greg. Thank you so much. We have a few minutes left. We could go to the audience. If anyone would like to ask a question, I'll gladly bring around the microphone. Anyone? Okay. We have one.

I guess you already alluded to this previously, but the building optimism that you guys could have an elevated number of deal wins over the coming years. What are you guys doing to prepare for that, particularly with respect to implementation specialists to get these deals live?

Yes. So great question. So we -- not just what's happening in the competitive space, but also just M&A in general. So we've already added teams to help us facilitate that. The good news is that in M&A, we get -- especially if it's a Jack Henry M&A, we get notice before it's actually officially approved, and we don't get the name of the institution. So we're able to prepare, create the slots. For the opportunity that's in the space today, our operational teams have already -- we built kind of a task force to create what we would need. The good news is we have time. To go out and sell a new deal, takes 6 to 12 months to implement a core deal could take another 12 to 24 months. So there's time for us to facilitate that. But our operational teams and our sales teams are aligned on making sure that, that strategy is in sync.

Thank you. All right. I think that was a great way to wrap it up. Greg, I want to thank you. I want to thank Vance and the Jack Henry team for being a part of our conference. Again, thanks for being here in Arizona.

Thank you, Tim. Appreciate it.