So good afternoon. I'd like to welcome everybody that's here in Dallas and everybody that is joining us online. My name is Vance Sherard, I'm Vice President of Investor Relations, and I'm gonna kick off the meeting today with just a couple of items. The first is that we've got a very full agenda today, so, but at the end of each presenter, they should have about five minutes for questions. But if you would look here, we're gonna start off with Greg Adelson is gonna talk about the state of Jack Henry. He's gonna be followed by Mimi Carsley, who is gonna give a financial review, and Shanon McLachlan, who's gonna talk about operations.
Then we're gonna have Ben Metz, Jack Henry's Chief Technology Officer, come up and give an update on the Jack Henry Platform & AI, and then we're gonna take a quick 15-minute break, and then after that, we're gonna do an SMB panel discussion. So that will be referencing the press release we put out on Tuesday, and we're gonna have Lee Wetherington leading that, followed by Brian Otte, who's Head of Sales and Marketing. And finally, any questions that didn't get asked at the end of every presenter's presentation, we can do that at that point.
So before I hand it over to Greg, I just wanna let everybody know here and online that we will be taking advantage of this safe harbor statement that covers risk factors, forward-looking statements, and non-GAAP financial measures. With that, it's my pleasure to welcome to the stage Jack Henry's President and CEO, Greg Adelson.
Thank you, Vance. Welcome, everybody. Hello? Hello. Okay, good. All right, well, I'll start over. So welcome to Dallas. I do wanna recognize a few people before we get started. So first of all, we do have two board members and one ex-CEO here. Dave Foss, our ex-CEO and Board Chair is here, and Wes Brown, who's also one of our board members, and they're here in attendance. Also, wanna thank our marketing team and Ken and the team for getting us organized and ready to go. I'm really excited about the opportunity to be here and talk about you know, Jack Henry and kinda where we are today as a company, but also where we're going tomorrow.
And that SMB announcement is just part of what I wanna talk about, with some of our priorities on where we're going. So today, you know, we continue to have. We talked a little bit about this on our earnings call in August, some of the highlights that we had, but we did have record revenue and operating income for fiscal year 2024. We've also, with the thanks of Mimi, added a bunch of new key metrics for our company, both inside and outside, that we're tracking to. We had an all-time record for sales bookings. We talked about that with fifty-seven core wins, but also, across the organization, we had a significant amount of additional quota attainment, again, led by Brian Otte, and he'll talk a little bit about that later today.
But I think it's really important that you all continue to recognize that our culture, our service, our One Jack Henry and tech modernization strategy continue to be significant reasons for us winning the number of deals that we are. And that, again, is not gonna change under me, but it's definitely been a key driver and a differentiator for us in the space.
The tech modernization strategy itself and our execution of that strategy, some of which, well, Ben will cover later today, big part, again, of us proving that we can do what we say we're gonna do, and that's really our mantra with our customers, is, "Do what we say we're gonna do." Successful rollout of several of our high-growth solutions, so you know about financial crimes, you know about Banno Business. We have several others that we'll be talking about and rolling out this fiscal year. And again, Ben will cover a couple of those, and Shanon will as well. And then I think a really big part for us has been a successful transition.
Again, I've talked a lot about the transition time with Dave and myself, but we've also had several others that have transitioned into new roles, and it's been very successful and seamless. All of those individuals are here today, but Shanon McLachlan, who you'll get a chance to meet, has been with our company for nine years, has done a tremendous job in a couple of different areas, and again, now taking over as COO. Jonathan Baltzell has been with our company 23 years, a lot of variety of roles in our banking and online and Banno Business. Again, now he's taken over as the head of our banking solutions.
Brynn Ammo n has been here for eleven years, almost twelve, and she's been at the company doing a lot of different things in our credit union group, and again, now leading our credit union solutions group, replacing Shanon in that role. Sue Geiss has been with us for 29 years, again, in all the different roles in the banking world.
But one of the things that we wanted to focus on, and I think you all saw this in our attainment of $15 billion+ wins, this past fiscal year versus $5 billion the year previous, is that having a person like Sue and her experience and a team that we've built around her, to really focus on the large client strategy and delivery of those clients as we win them, has been a big part of driving some of that. And then Abby Wood, who's now leading, the operational part of our digital group and has been with us, for about 13 years, working at Banno even before we acquired them. This is kind of just a quick look at my organization, as it is.
It's basically a lot of the functions that obviously reported to Dave before, but I did keep Ben, and I did keep Brian, who both were reporting to me previous to the acquisition or to the transition. I do want to tell you that I'm pretty excited about a new person that's gonna join our team on September the 16th, Erica Pilon. She's got a great reputation in this industry. She's coming to us from Capital One, but she also worked at NCR and worked at FIS previously as well. She's gonna run our strategy and execution of that strategy. She's got a lot of experience in SMB and a lot of the other things that we're focused on, so very excited about her joining the team as well.
This hasn't changed, and this is something that's a foundational part of our company, and it starts all the way back to Jack and Jerry, and I know Dave has gone through this, but I wanna make sure you all kinda get the update on where we are. Everything we do starts with our associates. It's driven by that foundation that we believe if we take care of our associates, our associates will take care of our clients, and then ultimately, all of the shareholders are happy with the amount of clients and the number of products that they're buying. So I'm gonna go through a little bit of this in a little more detail.
The other thing that we have tried to do over the last several years is change the mindset in the company and to really focus on both our leadership and how we work with our clients and using these four tenets as the basis. So starting with transparency, and that's really about having the conversations with our clients and with our associates that are not always what they want to hear. And I think we've gained a lot of credibility, and our reputation has continued to thrive, and you'll see that in some of our metrics. Because of that level of transparency that we have with our clients and again with our staff, our turnover is down as well.
Building consistency around the organization, that's the One Jack Henry mantra that you've heard over the last several years, and Shanon will dive into a little bit, but making sure that we look and act more like one company, and that's really where that, where that focus of consistency is. Collaboration goes without saying. It is about us working together, developing, being innovative within the company, but also outside the company. This whole SMB strategy that we were able to launch is based on that level of foundation of collaboration and working with somebody like Wade and his company to build this out. And then communication, so ultimately, we pride ourselves on the amount of communication we share internally and externally with our clients. So who we are today, so it hasn't significantly changed, but 7,100 or so associates. We still have four core processing systems.
You know that we've done $2.2 billion in revenue, roughly 300 products. We'll talk a little bit more about that at the end. 73% of our business now is in the private cloud. That's continued to grow, and then, as you all know, the market cap changes every day. But as I said earlier, it is about making sure that we take care of our associates, and one of the things that we pride ourselves on is that we send out... Dave actually started this. I've continued it with an anniversary email that we send out to our associates on their anniversary date. I sent out 25 of them this morning, and they go out, and they basically ask our associates to complete engagement surveys.
And so 77% of the associates that filled out that say that they have-- they've seen a work-life balance at Jack Henry, and that's, again, a big part of us being able to drive, to keep our associates here, to help make sure that we do the things that we say we're gonna do. Our average years of service, 9.2 years. Prior to our VDIP that we announced a year ago, it was 10.5, so it's come down a little bit, but still at 9.2 across the organization. And our overall engagement score is 79% for fiscal year 2024, and we're continuing to measure that and actually had some increases in July. So we're continuing to see that level of engagement that we want from our associates to happen.
As a by-product of that, we end up seeing this. I'm not gonna bore you with going through the list. It's in your deck, but as you can see, we have won a significant amount of Best Places to Work and also big awards like that come from Newsweek, where you see Most Loved Workplaces in America. We were number eleven. You can see in IDC's FinTech rankings, we were number twelve, and there's a whole host of things that happen both at the location level and again at the corporate level that we're pretty excited about and continue to drive our low attrition. Then lastly, kinda just looking at the overall fiscal year 2024 Experience Monitor .
So again, 87% of our associates believe in Jack Henry's values, 77% feel a sense of belonging, 77% trust us, 83% believe that we continue to demonstrate integrity at the leadership level. And as you can see, we had 63% of the overall associates that participated in the survey, which is exceeding the normal target of about 45%. So what that ultimately leads to is our superior customer service, and I think this goes without saying that we continue to lead the industry in our customer service reputation and our ability to make sure that, again, we do what we say we're gonna do.
So today, we have roughly 7,500 clients, 1,700-ish, our core clients, and the other 5,800 are from the old ProfitStars brand that are basically represented from products within our complementary and our payment solutions that we provide to those customers for competing core platforms. 99.8% of our business comes from the community and regional financial institutions. I can tell you that we're the only one in the industry that can really say that, especially from the Big Three. That we are focused on ensuring that community and regional financial institutions continue to thrive in the United States, and that's been our focus, and as we say, you know, there really isn't a plan B. That's really where we spend our time, making sure that we keep them relevant and growing.
The average client at Jack Henry actually has 56 of our products. Now, that's after a period of time, but the average core for our SilverLake is a little over 50 products, and our average for our Symitar Credit Union is about 35. So you can see there's some level of growth, especially in our smaller cores, with growth. We have some that have over 100 products, but again, the average, 56. 99% client retention rate, and I... You know, I would definitely challenge that with anybody else in the industry as well, from a standpoint of us continuing to keep our clients unless they are acquired. We have 12.2 million digital users that we announced on the last earnings call. Of course, that's already gone up, and we'll continue to talk about that.
And then another thing that I think is a big differentiator for us in the space and for our clients is that when we talk about openness, we're not just talking about it, we actually do it. So our fintech alliances, where we have over a thousand fintechs now that are integrated into our core digital payments, fraud platforms, is a significant amount of relationships that have been built through an easy way for them to come into the company. I think we issued close to two million tokens last year for fintechs to play in our sandbox. Again, so when we talk about an ease of and openness to do business with us, that's what we're talking about. So again, ultimately, this leads to customer service satisfaction.
We do roughly about 18-20 thousand use case surveys that folks have an opportunity to respond to, and that's per month. And so about 12% actually respond to the survey, but you can see that when you look at the actual survey scores, that you have to get a five, which is extremely satisfied, versus a three of meets expectations. And we continue to drive on average, better than 4.0. You can see for fiscal year 2024, we averaged 4.6. We actually are up to 4.62 now in the latest one. So we continue to drive up in a time when a lot of what the industry is seeing is a decline in service.
And so that's the overall customer service experience, and this is with the rep that they actually engage with, a 4.74 for all of last year, and we're up to 4.76 as of right now. So again, we continue to drive with our associates that level of customer enthusiasm and making sure that we're doing the right thing. And again, the customers... You know, most people don't fill out surveys when they're happy, and I think that's another good indication that people are doing that. We talk about this a lot, so our investment in technology continues to be another differentiator for us. So we're at about 14%-15%, have been for the last seven or eight years.
That continues to be a big part of the things that we're doing to make sure we're building our own technology. We're fortunate to have leaders like Ben and the rest of his team to help us drive that, and so we wanna make sure that we're taking advantage of what we can build ourselves. And again, you'll hear more about the SMB and other things we're working on. But off to the right is just a small piece of things that we've been talking through over the last couple of years that are part of that investment. And then ultimately, it's making sure that we keep our shareholders happy.
So you know, we're roughly $2.2 billion right now, 91% recurring revenue for the company, which has continued to go up in the thirteen years that I've been here, to be where it is today. We're pretty proud of the 20 years of increasing dividend flow for our shareholders. Again, we just announced another dividend increase just recently. And then 96.7% of our stock is institutionally held, again, which is great from a long-term investment standpoint. Up and to the right is really what, you know, this message is here. That continues to be a big focus for us. You know, as you saw in our guidance for this year, we're talking about double-digit EPS growth as part of the guidance.
So again, that focus will continue into fiscal year 2025. We're pretty proud of the fact that we continue to. You may have even seen in the awards that we had won some stuff for corporate sustainability with some of the things that we did with Newsweek and others. But this is a big focus for us and continues to be. We've issued our fourth report out in May. If you haven't had a chance to read it, it was really well done, which is all of them have been, but it continues to improve.
But we wanna stay focused on our purpose and mission, and that is to ensure that we strengthen the connections between account holders and the institutions they serve in the communities that they live, and that's through technology and service. And as a by-product of that, we wanna make sure that we empower those account holders to be able to have financial freedom. And so everything that we are focused on, we put that mission at task to make sure that we're staying true to what we say we're gonna do, again, for our institutions. But again, the commitment to the people, the commitment to the communities, the commitment to the planet, and then the overall commitment and responsible business practices that we continue to do and operate as good as anybody in the industry.
So this is some feedback that we've received through meetings with our investors, with the analysts, that we kinda put together, and you know, I think this gives a little bit of a summary of how we believe you view us and how we have worked with you in the past, so again, culture is a big thing in driving that ability to keep our associates here. History of doing the right thing and doing whatever it takes, it's on the back of our business cards, and it's what we do every single day to strive to be different in the industry. We believe there continues to be a sizable market opportunity and growing our share.
We've seen that with the number of wins that we've had, that we continue to increase our market share at a time when that's not happening in the industry with some of our larger competitors. And so we're very proud of continuing to stay focused on that. We have a durable moat and business model resiliency. We've talked a lot about that. Mimi's covered that in a lot of different meetings as well, but we're very bullish on the fact that that will continue with what we're building and how we're going.
Strong balance sheet and free cash flow generation. I know that's a topic that we cover on pretty much every investor meeting and earnings call, but we're highly focused on that, and Mimi's driving those things throughout the business, and we'll continue to see that improve. We've always been a disciplined acquirer, and I think, you know. And we've done a good job through the years. You know, Dave led a lot of those in the past, but we are still gonna continue to look at opportunities that make sense for the company. But we'll continue to be disciplined in that approach.
And we also have a different view in what is important to us, so we don't have as many gaps as we once did when we were acquiring a lot of companies. But we also have the ability now to look at things that need to be public cloud native, need to be an API-first mentality, need to fit with our tech modernization strategy, much like Payrailz did when we acquired them. So there'll be other things that we'll continue to look at, but again, we're gonna be very disciplined in our approach. And then we're always gonna be looking to invest in our future. So, as you know, Dave has reminded me through the years that he learned from Jack Henry himself, was, "We are not... Our customers are not in business to make Jack Henry successful.
We are in business to make them successful. And the more that we can make them successful, we will ultimately be successful as well." And that's where we focus our time and attention, so for me, you know, I want to share a little bit of what I view as my strategic priorities, at least for the foreseeable future. I'm sorry, we haven't gotten there yet. I just missed my own slide. I apologize, but the Strategy Benchmark , this is a big part of what we drive to help us deliver what we think are the important priorities for the company, so we've done this, as you can see, that we've done it 6x . We just got the results back in February. We had an opportunity to gather this information.
We've shared it in a couple of white papers, but I'm just gonna give you a couple of highlights on why we continue to be bullish and we believe you should continue to be bullish on this industry and where we are going as a company. As you can see, this survey goes out to CEOs and gives an opportunity for them to provide feedback on the things that they believe are opportunities for them and also potentially challenges. So again, 80% of the folks, of the CEOs that responded to this, out of the 127, 80% plan to have an investment in their technology.
And you can see by the asset segmentation there that it ranges, but if you kinda take from the top piece, where we're really mostly focused, the five hundred to the billion opportunities and plus opportunities, you can see a significant amount of numbers of folks that are planning to continue to increase their technology spend. And we are big believers that if you want to continue to compete in this market or in the markets that they serve, technology is the way for them to do that. And this is a big part of our strategies and conversations with them, and making sure that they stay at the forefront of their respective segments. So you again can see the number of folks that are there.
And then, you know, the number of opportunities have continued to stay pretty much steady for over the last several years, but these three have continued to really be the ones that have been at the forefront, and I'll give you a summary in a second. But 54% believe in growing deposits, still is number one, 43% increasing operational efficiency, and 38% growing loans. And again, as you look down the list and you look at the segmentation of what we have by asset size, you can again see where the opportunities are for companies like Jack Henry. You know, what we're building with the SMB strategy is also a big part of driving deposits, and that will continue to be a focus for us as part of a part of the pitch.
And so I'm sure Ben and Wade will talk a little bit about that as we get into it. But overall, over the last three years, as I mentioned, really not much change in what is the most important for our customers. And so when you look at growing deposits, and you look at increasing operational efficiencies and growing loans, those kind of, you know, piggybacked and forth. But really, between 2023 and 2024, it was the same three, just a little bit of a deviation in percentages. But again, the things that we are working on with our LoanVantage product, the things that we're working on with our enterprise account opening product, the things that we've been doing in a lot of our.
A couple of our acquisitions, like Agiletics and small pieces like that, that we're integrating into other parts of our company, are continuing to give us an opportunity to do that. And then lastly, and, you know, one of the things that came out of the survey was that 78% of those CEOs said they needed an SMB strategy. And so again, we had already been looking and working towards something like this, but this is a good validation that our customers and prospects are very interested in what we're gonna offer. So ultimately, that is going to allow us to focus, continue to focus on the future of our clients and the future of Jack Henry.
And this is just a quick summation of what I see as the priorities for me and the team as we continue to move forward. Don't wanna lose the reputation that we've really built over the last six years of truly being an innovative technology company. You know, we've done a lot of the rebuilding. We had partnerships that we've, you know, built through the years. Mainly, those were because of speed to market. But now we're at a point where we're actually leading the market, and I think you're gonna continue to see that level of innovation come out of our product sets and the things that we've already launched that, you know, still have a long runway to go. We talked about the $1 billion+ space.
I think most of you know, I think I mentioned this on the last earnings call, but our average asset size now for banks and credit unions is over $1.3 billion and has continued to grow. Our bank asset size has grown 27%, our credit union 34% over the last four years, and that has continued to be both through products that we've given, some acquisitions, but opportunities to continue to grow that base. Execute on our technology modernization strategy, that is a big part of our One Jack Henry strategy.
That is a big part of what we believe continues to drive a wedge between us and others because of our ability to not only have the strategy but execute on the strategy, which is, you know, even more important. Outside the core, we've talked a little bit about what we're doing with Banno. We talked about we're gonna take card. We'll continue to provide some updates on that, but that is moving along, maybe a little bit slower in some cases than with a couple of the cores. But the reality is it's moving along, and we're continuing to work towards the getting that outside the base. Product rationalization is something I've talked to several of you about.
You know, when you start to look at our investment in the 14%-15%, the reality is, for Jack Henry to be successful and for our clients to be successful, we don't need 300 products to do that. And so we're looking at opportunities through tech modernization to sunset, to be able to end of life in various ways, some of those duplicate products. So we talk about wires and our launch of wires. So we have six wires platforms that are tied to our cores and tied to our payments businesses, that will end up, you know, end of lifing.
What that ends up meaning for us is an ability to, one, lessen the cost of the maintenance on those products, but also the ability for things like ISO 20022 that's come out, and we have to actually do that work on six different core platforms that we will only have to do it on one. As we're building out this technology, that is our focus, to make sure that we build it once, and we use it multiple times across the organization. Not only is Ben and his team leading that, but Shanon and his team are actually embracing it and working towards it, and that will be a big thing for us in the future. We talked about SMB. I won't spend any more time really on that. I got one more slide on it, but generative AI.
So, Shanon's gonna talk a little bit about what we are doing at the company, and kinda where our focus is to be a responsibly bold and balanced approach to generative AI. So that will continue to be a big point of focus for us. Mostly internally, some in our products that we'll talk about and Ben will cover, but you'll see that, you know, we believe that there's a lot of this that we need to do inside the company first to build that understanding, build that efficiency gains, and then be able to ultimately use that down the road. And then continued focus on security and compliance. You know, you can't be in this industry without that being top of mind.
So though it's listed last, it's definitely not last in a level of priority for us and for our customers. So a lot more on this to come, but just the teaser before the panel is, you know, one of the things that we've been super excited about is the be able to work on this and launch it and be able to get it done for today. So the one-click merchant account onboarding, the team's gonna talk about that, and I already talked about creating the level of deposit growth. The increased visibility for the SMBs into their cash flow and same-day deposits. You'll learn that we can actually settle 8x a day for the SMB. That is gonna be a huge differentiator as well.
I have that on the next window, so our next bullet. Key value proposition for the SMB themselves is tap-to-pay capabilities for both iOS and Android. So right now, there isn't anybody else in the industry that we know of that has both, and many have iOS 'cause it was the easiest to get done, but we'll be bringing both to the equation. This itemized transaction acquiring settlement is really important to be able to cut out the amount of time that it takes for an SMB to reconcile their transactions back to whatever accounting system they're using. And so that is a big, big part of what we think is a unique feature, and again, the team will talk a little bit about that.
And then instant balance transfers, being able to use the real-time payments networks and other networks to be able to facilitate that. So again, just a little bit on this. So for me, kinda as I wrap up, you know, what's top of mind for me in my role? So obviously, what's going on with the election, interest rates, you know, general economy uncertainty. It looks like the Fed's gonna be 25-50 basis points reduction for interest rates. We'll see whether that happens, so that's kinda what everything is pointing to.
But again, if you look at the enthusiasm that our institutions that, you know, we surveyed, as well as what we've seen with our sales momentum, you know, we don't see any slowdown, and I think that's really important for us to continue to focus on. Bank M&A, we do expect to pick up based on information we've received from both our banks and our credit unions on things that are in the hopper. Depending on the election results, so there could be maybe some better expedition of some of those mergers and acquisitions than they are today, 'cause they are a little slower than they have been in the past, but we do expect that to pick up. Our sales pipeline continues to be really robust.
We're still, and Brian will share with you, we're still at our pipeline levels that are near all-time highs after coming off an all-time record in Q4. And again, a big tribute to Brian and the team, and again, the interest in the space. Staying ahead of the FDIC, CFPB, and regulatory environment, it's always been changing. It's way different than it was from March of last year, after SVB and Signature. But we're continuing to stay ahead of it. We continue to focus and put dollars towards it, but again, that's just part of our business model. Organization on operational changes, again, we continue to get positive feedback, both internally and externally.
So I'm really excited about the transition and the team that we've been able to put in place, that's got a renewed sense of energy and positiveness just because, again, a lot of them are new to those roles and but have been at the company a long time, with a chance to really provide some impact. You're gonna hear this all the time from us in meetings, and Shanon knows that it's his mantra. He's got a T-shirt that says, "Execution, execution, execution." And we have to execute on the strategies that are already out there. Tech modernization, even in what we're doing with the product rationalization and One Jack Henry, and of course, the things that we just announced.
But our ability to continue to drive a wedge and an opportunity with our not only existing clients, but prospects, is our ability to do what we say we're gonna do, and that is all about execution, and then ultimately, a successful launch of the SMB strategy. We're already part of the way there. We got a couple other things that will be coming that will be part of announcements in the future, but we're very excited about this opportunity, so ultimately, it all ends with what started with Jack and Jerry, and this is our company philosophy about doing the right thing, doing whatever it takes, and having fun, and we're very proud of that, and we try really hard to do that as a company and to continue to build our culture.
That is all I had from a standpoint of going through what's happening at Jack Henry today and hopefully tomorrow. Any questions for me, or I can wait to take them later as well? Kartik?
Yeah, just one question real quick. You talked about the sales pipeline and that continuing to grow, and I'm not sure if this question is gonna make sense. But I guess if you look at, like, capacity utilization, do you get to a point where the revenue growth can only be so much because you're utilizing your people for everything you have? I know there's install teams for the core and install teams for the other products, so hopefully that makes sense.
It, it does, and I think what you will see a dynamic, a change, that as we are changing through the strategies that we're unveiling, we're also changing our approach to some of our sales team, the operational team. We're not just going back and continuing just because we're building all this new stuff, that we're going to continue to approach things at the exact same way we did before. So when you think about tech modernization, you think about some of the components that we've built. You know, selling those individual components is a different skill set than some of the folks that we have maybe today to sell some of those. SMB will be a different skill set, and so there'll be a dynamic of change there.
So I think from a standpoint of our opportunity and our pipeline, you know, that could be several years down the road, but the reality is we're already looking at that, and we're looking at things that will continue to help drive not just the opportunities that we see today in front of us, but the opportunities that will be created because of what we're building. That's really where the changes are occurring. Does that answer your question?
Yeah.
Okay. Anybody else? Yeah, Jason.
Yeah, thank you. And I guess, so my question, you brought up macro, and when I think of when rates go up, you kind of benefit from things like CPI escalators, maybe more CD accounts, maybe even, oh, yeah, float income. But when rates go down, M&A activity might pick up, and then you benefit from conversion merge activity picking up. Is either way better? Like, do you prefer when rates go up or down, or is it all kind of the same?
As you know, we've had many years in the last, you know, 10-12 years of rates being nowhere, and I think we've been pretty successful and stable. And I think the same answer is where we are today. So prior to that, we lived through the other side of that. And so I think the thing that we have done a really good job at is that CPI is a very little needle mover for us, and so we manage through that through contracts and how we do that, so that isn't a big deal. Yes, there is some interest that, you know, we would earn, that maybe we would earn less on, but again, you know, that's not our end game for driving profitability.
And so I think longer term, I think this is actually better for us because it's better for our institutions, and so that's where I think the dynamic comes in.
Maybe just a quick follow-up to that too. Does either way, either type of macro situation put you in a better relative position against your competitors, like, or... Again-
I don't think so, relatively. I think the relative differentiation is, as I've been describing, what we are doing, that's really what the differentiator is, not necessarily the economy itself.
Hey, Greg, thanks for taking the question. Just a question on the SMB strategy. It does seem like there's sort of an angle there with merchant acquiring, and I know that's one place that Jack Henry stayed away from over the years. So just how has kind of your thought process or strategy changed around just the importance of distributing merchant acquiring through the bank channel?
Yeah, it's hard to see up here. Is that Will?
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, it's a great question, and one I've already received offline. We're not doing the merchant acquiring, okay? That's where Moov comes in. Moov is the merchant acquiring acquirer. Moov is taking the risk. That's all on them. So the ebbs and flows that happen in typical merchant acquiring businesses that you see and have seen through the past, you're not gonna see. Our revenue model is a revenue share. And so and it's contemplated on risk and reward, as well. But the reality is, Moov is the acquirer. We're using the technology that we built through Ben and his team in the tech modernization, to be able to drive the differentiation to allow this strategy to truly be unique, and that's really where the difference is. But we're not getting into merchant acquiring.
And then the other side of that is, our strategy is only through institutions. We are not selling to the institution's clients. We're not doing that. We're not going around them, we're going through them. And so, we've spent a lot of time and focus with the card associations to help us with the marketing aspects to ensure that that's a successful endeavor. And so there's a lot more of that to come, but hopefully, that answers your question.
Thank you very much. I wanted to follow up quickly on Dave's question, and just how... Like, I think the survey results of what your banks are saying they want to invest in, et cetera, is interesting. How should we be thinking about kind of environment to- versus lag to decision-making, right? So when interest rates were rising a lot, and there was certainly a lot of talk about banks needing to try to pursue deposits and secure deposits, et cetera, and now as they're kind of receding, are banks just lagging, or does that prioritization of deposits and securing deposits actually go up? And how should we think about that change in interest rates impacting demand environment from your bank customers?
It's a great question. I think based on the increase, we have not seen any slowdown. Again, back to having record quarters. We had three record quarters this last fiscal year and a record year overall. So we're not seeing the slowdown in that aspect, and I would foresee, based on what is, you know, occurring right now or what potentially will occur, when the Fed meets in September, is the same, and here's why. When you look at our pipeline, and you look to, kinda to your point about technology driving their ability to succeed, if they are gonna slow down on their technology buying, then they're probably preparing themselves for something else.
And so what we have seen in the customers that we are working with, they may slow down a decision by a month. It may bump from one month to the other, but it isn't bumping from one month to six or eight months later. So I have not seen anything else on that, and when Brian gets up here, he can address that maybe even more directly, but that's what we have seen to date.
Just a quick one, Greg. You talked about the opportunity to do some to sunset some old platforms with the tech modernization strategy. Like, I think you talked about the wires platform. Just curious on what timeframe you think we'll be able to see some of those benefits?
So it's a great question, and it is an evolution. Some of those platforms have to go through normal sunsetting. Our rules are usually two years with our customers, so some of that takes some time. But there are other things that we are looking at that might make sense from a divestiture standpoint or might make sense just to, based on the number of customers on the platform, to do something, you know, do something different. But I will tell you, for this fiscal year, which is maybe what you're most concerned about, I don't see anything significant, but there are some things that we're actively looking at. Okay.
I'd like to introduce our Chief Financial Officer, Mimi Carsley, who's been with us about two years now, and she will fill you in on what's going on in the world of finance.
Thanks, Greg. Am I all set? Okay. Can you hear? Awesome. Okay. Welcome, everyone, so glad you could join us today. At last year's Investor Day, I shared my perspective on the Jack Henry investment thesis, and Greg went over a little bit of the what makes Jack Henry a great and attractive company, so this year, based on the last two years of insights gained from conversations with you all, with a lot of conversations with investors, I wanted to share the top and important five key metrics that collectively we're tracking, and these metrics are important because they demonstrate our focus and the importance of our sustainable performance. Excuse me.
So I'm proud we just closed fiscal year 2024, and we either delivered on or exceeded the performance on each of these five metrics relative to guidance and internal targets that we had, so a really great year overall. First, non-GAAP revenue growth. Solid 7.4%. As a reminder, that's off of a $2 billion-plus base of prior year, so growing strong on top of a large number. Two, non-GAAP operating income margin expansion at 60 basis points. Again, a continuation, we talked last year at Investor Day about compounding the increasing profitability of the company and delivering upon that. So great at 60 basis points.
Three, GAAP EPS at $5.23 per share, and that's in a year of some GAAP headwinds that you guys all know about, and we're very much focused on returning to double-digit EPS growth. The fourth, free cash flow conversion, better than we expected at 88%, and at $337 million, it was $130 million more, an improvement in free cash flow over the prior year, and fifth, return on invested capital at nearly 20%, so a really impressive number there, so let's cover each in more detail. Okay. As you've heard us talk in conversations with each of you many times, their near-term growth model is around 7% - 8% from a non-GAAP revenue performance.
It's comprised of a blend of our vast portfolio of solutions that have varying levels of impact and growth. So one way to think about that diverse portfolio is the key and non, or let's say, lesser key, if that's kind of a word, sources of revenue. So key revenue makes up three-quarters of our portfolio mix and is the sources of a lot of our future strategic sources of revenue. It includes cloud and our processing business. Our cloud is our public and private cloud fees, contracts terming around seven years plus , on average, and processing revenue, so remittance, card, transactional, digital, including transaction and mobile processing fees. The remaining one quarter of our portfolio, if we think about that lesser key revenue, it's still important. It's still big dollars.
It's still important in providing our FIs with choice, and it often leads to supporting key revenue businesses. So included in that is the sale of software licenses, implementation services, deconversion revenue, consulting, hardware, and on-premise support. But the non-key revenue is growing at a lower rate, and sometimes in the cases of hardware and deconversion revenue, can vary year to year. So as we think about that, and as Greg touched upon, we're gonna continue to evaluate that full product portfolio, think about product rationalization, assessing the alignment of each of our products and solutions to our strategic priorities and the future performance potential. So our solid revenue growth is no new thing. It's a result on who we serve, the solutions we offer, and the construct of our business model.
Throughout today's presentations, and Greg already touched upon some of it, you'll hear about our significant market share positions and what our customers and prospects are telling us in terms of the increasing spending that they plan to do. What underpins our robust revenue growth is the delivery of technology that FIs need to stay competitive and serve their account holders and grow, solution innovation and product breadth, and service excellence that leads to incredible client retention, willingness to sign long-term contracts, and benefits where we grow as our clients grow. So shifting from revenue to margin. Jack Henry's three operating segments each contribute revenue and margin expansion. Our model yields growth and profitability across our business lines. So our core segment, we have banking and credit union mission-critical processing systems like Symitar and SilverLake.
And we think about there the trends around margin expansion, such as the continual shift to private cloud usage and existing client growth and new sales market share gains. Our second segment, our payment segment, there we handle over $230 billion processing monthly processing volume and over 1 billion monthly transactions, card payments and related services like fraud, rewards, and others. Our enterprise payments business, which is a payment remote deposit capture, our ACH business, and our risk tools around payments, and our payments hub and our consumer and commercial businesses, leading industry bill pay, account to account, P2P, and where we have our faster rails payments like Zelle, fraud, and now FedNow. So in that segment, the margin expansion trends we're continuing to see is the increased interest in our attractive margin products and scaled infrastructure. And lastly, our complementary segment.
So these are a lot of the specialty product solutions that we offer FIs, and things like our digital, lending, account opening, treasury management, fraud, and many others. And here we have the margin expansion drivers of attractive new products and cloud delivery. So all summing up, that profitability and strength across the board with healthy trends in the future for margin expansion. So let's talk about that margin expansion a little bit more in terms of the construct of our business model. So we benefit from a SaaS model that generates ongoing margin expansion, and the foundational tenets of our business lead to our ability to have increased profitability.
The magic of a software business of deliver one, sell often, the multi-tenant architecture with low variable costs, our Jack Henry tech modernization effort with shared software components that Greg mentioned earlier, and our One Jack Henry simplification efforts. We also have our data center scalability, and over time, we'll be using a private and colo and public cloud usage. And our client growth leading to increased accounts, users, and transactions with minimal associated costs. We've already talked about product mix and cross-sell opportunities and our zero-based position management and cost control environment approach. So then, looking forward beyond the model today, we have the increased public cloud usage, the Jack Henry tech modernization and monetization of that platform, product rationalization, and our AI-related efficiencies. So the third metric, GAAP EPS.
From our start in nineteen eighty-six, with $0.03 on a non-adjusted basis of earnings, to this last year at $5.23, Jack Henry has a long history of delivering on shareholder value through EPS growth. Jack Henry is a premium, high-quality earnings company with strong operating income flowing to bottom-line EPS. And furthermore, our minimal debt profile and repurchase efforts to offset dilution ensure shareholder value creation. FY 2024, we delivered $0.47 from operations. We faced a $0.37 headwind from deconversion revenue, our VDIP program, and the absence of the prior year gain. But as we look forward to FY 2025, we're expected to return to solid double-digit growth with a guidance target of EPS increases of 10.6%-12.3%.
The fourth metric, free cash flow, and as you know, we've talked a lot about free cash flow this year. Similar to streamlined flow from operating income to net income, Jack Henry has a long history of free cash flow generation. This past two years, there was some new, a bit of noise, collections, timing, tax rate changes, but we're trending back to the historical levels of free cash flow. We're committed to sustainable growth and outsized long-term value creation, staying ahead, investing for our future, and Greg mentioned that 14%-15%, we invest in R&D, about driving that innovation to ensure future company success and profitability, and that profitability will also help us from not only supporting existing clients but obtaining new ones in the future, so our strong free cash flow enables us to invest for tomorrow and return capital to our shareholders.
The fifth metric, return on invested capital. We're committed to being responsible stewards of investor capital, and as such, we're disciplined capital allocators. The result is FY 2021 to FY 2024 ROIC range of 19.2%-24.9%, and over that period, we've returned significant capital to our shareholders. We've distributed $576 million in dividends, 22 consecutive fiscal years, 20 calendar years, as Greg mentioned, and we've repurchased over $679 million of Jack Henry stock. Our attractive ROIC is an indicator of our high standards and experienced execution on M&A and internal projects. And lastly, we're responsible in how we manage our balance sheet, our low leverage profile, and our proven track record of promptly repaying M&A-related debt. So let's recap the financial five and think about the outlook for next year.
The guidance is for non-GAAP revenue growth of 7-8%, non-GAAP operating income margin expansion of 25-40 basis points, GAAP EPS of 10.6-12.3%, free cash flow conversion of 65%-75%, and a ROIC of 20 or higher. Together, signaling another solid year of consistency, strength, growth, and profitability, and a bright future. So with that, I wanted to thank you for your commitment to understanding our business, for the feedback you give us throughout the year, so that we can continue to increase the transparency and your understanding of what we're doing. With that, I'm gonna open it up for questions, and we already have one.
Thanks, Mimi. So I just had a question following up on the guidance. You talked about the first quarter on the earnings call, starting out a little softer. Can you just talk about the accelerants beyond Q1 and any other call-outs we should be aware of as we think about quarterly modeling and the different revenue lines, how that may evolve during the course of the year?
Yeah. So I can appreciate your need to look at it on a quarterly basis, but I would just encourage you to think about our business on an annual basis. From year to year, depending on what's coming out of the new sales pipeline, what the calendar slot is for conversions, what product timing or release it is, will vary that kind of quarter-to-quarter cadence. So, typically, we don't really give a lot of information on quarters because of the FY 2025 first quarter being a little lower than historical relative to the rest of the year, and how we're going to have a much stronger second half than first half. We did, on the most recent call, go into a little bit more information around that.
But if we think back to FY 2024 first quarter, there's a lot of rollover. We had a really strong year for hardware in the first quarter. And again, just that pipeline of what's coming in and out in a given year. So as we expect the year to continue, we see the second half payments being stronger than the first. We just expect as the year goes on, we're going to have some help just based on the slots and who we know is coming into the pipeline. Jacob, there's a mic coming at you.
Mimi said several times, you know, highlighting the double-digit EPS growth Greg mentioned in his opening remarks. You know, how do you think about yourselves? Is that sustainable? You know, do you think about you are a double-digit EPS grower, or is that how analysts and investors should think about Jack Henry longer term?
Yeah, I think this year was more of an anomaly than typical, because of the headwinds we faced, because of the VDIP program that we had. But if we think about the focus on continuous improvement, the focus we have on cost control, the things we talked about from just the straight-through nature of our business should lead to double-digit growth.
Hi.
Hi, Chuck.
Two questions. Chuck Nabhan from Stephens. First, when you think about the opportunity for rationalization across your businesses, could you give us a sense for where some of those assets sit within the segments, whether it's more weighted towards complementary or core? And then my second question is on free cash flow. You guys have done a good job offsetting some of the 174 headwinds, and just wanted to get a sense for looking beyond next year, the opportunity to improve free cash flow conversion beyond that 65%-75%.
Sure. Let me take them in the order and remind me if I forget the second question by the time I answer the first. As we think about you know, the year and we think about product rationalization, it's not gonna be a short-term program. I mean, at three hundred product solutions, this is just the evolution of lifecycle management that we do every day, that Shanon and his team work with the product groups on. I would say it's far less likely to be in core than it is going to be heavily in complementary. There is some potential in payments, but we've already done a lot of streamlining of the solutions within payments. If you think about the number of solutions we offer and the products, it's mostly gonna be in that complementary segment.
Unlike some of the others in our segment, we don't have a dozen cores. We have one credit union core. We need that. We only have three banking cores, and the most people are on our flagship SilverLake core. So it's really not going to be in the core segment. Examples like Greg said about wires, for example, and having multiple wires or multiple account opening solutions. So as we go through a lot of the tech modernization work under Ben's guidance, and thinking about what are those shared software components that he can build with the business units, and then we can have utilized across the company. That's where a lot of that efficiency is going to come out of. Your second question around free cash flow.a
So even without the government addressing Section 174, which we think will eventually be rectified, we're hopeful, regardless of what happens in the economic... the election, that we think it will be addressed. If it is addressed, you'll see an even improved bounce in the free cash flow. But if not, you'll start to see, as we've built up now a basis for that five-year cycle of development expense, you'll see it. So we do see a light where we're gonna return to the historical levels of free cash flow conversion in the short order.
Let me just add one point on the product rationalization that I think is important also, is that not only is we're looking at our acquisitions for things that are public cloud native and API, we may look at products that aren't strategic enough to build into the public cloud or rebuild into the public cloud. So those could be other things that we determine that from a strategy standpoint, they don't really make a lot of sense, and if we're not going to follow the rest of our mantra for that, then they may be candidates for other stuff.
Coming to you.
Thank you. Thank you. And so I guess my, my question, the shift to outsourcing has been a nice driver, like 45 , I think roughly forty-five a year shifts. How much of a revenue tailwind has that been the last few years? As that starts to... at some point, it's gonna be hard, what replaces that, and will the replacement be as big as the benefit you've had?
Yeah. So Dave's talking about that shift from on-premise, where the client hosts all of the solutions within their own kind of financial institution, to where they're utilizing the Jack Henry private cloud solution. As Greg mentioned in his slides, we're at 37% today. Surprisingly, it's been a very steady increase each year, about that, you know, 40-50 conversions a year that we continue to see. But what'll be interesting is over the next couple of years, will some avoid, you know, our Jack Henry private cloud go straight to public cloud, right? So as we start to think, we probably feel like you cap out in the 90s% in the private cloud utilization. There's some that just always will wanna host it in their own environment.
But, again, will some of those now move from private cloud to public cloud, or will some leapfrog straight to public cloud? So we think there'll be revenue upside from moving from private cloud to public cloud, certainly not at the 2x revenue we saw from on-premise to private cloud, but an attractive upside as well. All right. We'll get you in a sec, Kartik.
Mark Feldman with William Blair. So just a quick question, you know, kind of piggybacking off the last one. You talk about the revenue uplift of, you know, going from in to out and then, you know, from the hosted model to the public cloud. But is there any way to think about the revenue uplift and also the margin expansion opportunity as clients, you know, for example, switch from the older solutions like NetTeller, goDough, to Banno, or, you know, what you're talking about today with six different wire solutions and going to one, you know, I'd assume, you know, cloud-native, similar type of product?
Yeah. So part of the revenue model of our seven to eight is things like moving from NetTeller to Banno today, and that will continue. It'll also be, you know, things like Banno are only inside our base today. So as we move more solutions, and potentially bundles of solutions outside the base of these really leading-edge technologies, there's uplift from that as well, as well as just kind of new greenfield space. So that will help from a revenue pipeline.
And then a lot of the things that we're just starting to talk about today, things like our SMB strategy, other opportunities on the tech modernization, more on the outside the base, aren't part of that 7%-8% growth algorithm, but we think help us either to get to the higher end of that or maybe even break through and beyond.
Mimi, I think this year, Greg, you talked about winning 57 core wins, and that's a little bit more than normal. If you have a year where you are normal or less than normal, is there a headwind that happens? And if so, you know, when could that... how long does it take for that headwind to happen? Because I'm assuming it's not only the sale of the core solutions, but you're selling other solutions to those customers as well.
Sure. So the first thing to remember is we give you the number as an indicator, the same way we tell you if we have a record pipeline or how we've replenished the pipeline. But a year of forty-seven may be less attractive than a year of 30, right? If they're all really large institutions or those institutions just take more product. So the challenge with the business is there are only so many people up for renewal. And so you can't really say, "Oh, we wanna get 80 in a year," if there aren't eighty to be had, and to win. So I don't think that it comes to an end because of people's maturity cycle and when they're coming up for renewal. I think that process will kind of remain as it is today.
But as we continue to gain more our market share, upmarket, as we continue to have new solutions for them, I think there's still upside from that. Any others? Okay. We'll have time after. With that, I have the pleasure of introducing, to his first Investor Day, our COO, Shanon McLachlan.
If I don't fall.
Yeah, I recommend that way.
Thank you. Thank you. All right, so yes, I just about tripped on the steps on my first day. I'm sorry. First, I have this pleasure to be able to talk with you today. I should probably click forward. I am Shanon McLachlan, and that is how you pronounce my name, and, I'm happy to be here. I'm the COO for Jack Henry, and I'm gonna be taking this through a few different things today, including an introduction. We'll do a key product update, we'll talk about the internal use of AI, and then we'll talk about some of the One Jack Henry initiatives. So I really don't wanna sit here and look at this picture, so I'm... From an introduction perspective, I've been with Jack Henry for nine years.
I joined actually what used to be the ProfitStars group, and then moved into the core group in running the Credit Union Solutions, and then most recently as COO. But prior to joining Jack Henry, I've actually been in the fintech space, serving banks and credit unions for about thirty years. So lots of different experiences, lots of different opportunities, and lots of stuff that I'm able to bring to the organization. In there, I ran different roles. So background-wise, I'm a technologist, so I did a lot of development, conversions, conversion processing, but I also ran all of operations for many of the businesses that we had. So nice balance, nice experience that I'm happy to bring to the organization here. We'll get off that picture, and we'll move on to the key product update.
So get the pleasure of talking about just a few of our key products, and we're gonna start out with Financial Crimes Defender. Okay, so we've heard a few different things that have been talked about, financial crimes as an example. We won the Fintech Breakthrough Award, right? It's a huge award that was on Greg's list early on in his presentation, and the recognition there is that it's the fraud prevention product of the year. Right? Those are the types of things that we're looking to do with these new technologies that we're bringing out, these new products that we're bringing out. But what is Financial Crimes Defender? It's a real-time anti-money laundering, right, AML solution, that's built ground up to help us and help our clients reduce, eliminate, fraud in a real-time fashion. So it's cloud native.
We built it from scratch, so we built it cloud native right out of the gate. Its key features run down the list, but the AML side of it, the AML engine, the comprehensive case management, so we can deal with cases right inside the product. The regulatory reporting aspects of it are all things that help us move this in the marketplace, and you look at it from a success perspective, and I know we're in early days, but when you look at the numbers, we've already got 154 enterprise sales. We've got another 83 that have purchased select modules. So what that means is they've just gotten components of the solution, not the entire solution. From a core perspective, right, we're focused in on our own cores.
So SilverLake, we get the breakout on the right-hand side there, but SilverLake has 93 of those sales, Symitar with 32, CIF 20/20 with 28, and Core Director with 1. It is a generally available product, and for SilverLake and with Symitar, it's in the early adopter mode. Now, keep in mind, these things are all plugged into also the real-time payments, right? That's why it's so important. Faster payments mean faster fraud. We've got to be able to stop it as quickly as we possibly can. Next up is Banno Business. So Banno Business, we know this is not a one-size-fits-all type of a product. So we created a scalable solution, and the continuum there kinda gives you an idea of what that scale looks like.
But we start out with the entrepreneurs, the gig economy workers on the left-hand side, and we work through, like, keeping them focused on cash flows, keeping them focused on getting their money. And then we move to the right-hand side as we get more complex, more sophisticated, more people that have to have their hands on the solution. So we have capabilities like, it's the payroll integration, it's ACH, it's all about the entitlements, right? Bringing those things to bear, and bringing them to bear in a way that the customer can use them, right? They enable it themselves. Everything is parameter-driven, is toggle-driven. We don't have to go touch it again once we get them up and running. So those things are super important to us. And you look at the success rates there. SilverLake and Symitar customers are both live today.
We've got 399 signed agreements for Banno Business already, and 161 have completed the implementation. The others are different phases of install, different phases of being scheduled, et cetera. But lots of great success there as well. That leads us into faster payments. Faster payments, right, is a big thing that's going on out there, to the tune of the way that people are trying to adopt it today. This is a survey from Cornerstone Advisors, but what we're talking about here is that in this next year, 32% of banks, 34% of credit unions are planning on rolling out something more with faster payments, right? That's a big number. That's a big increase in one single year.
What does it actually look like, and how have we gotten to where we are? FedNow was launched. I want you to pay attention to that date, 'cause it's gonna come back up on the next slide, but launched June, July twentieth of 2023. So if you look at this chart, the very first few months are really, really flat. Lot of, you know, uncertainty, a lot of adoption, like trying to figure out how to install, how to get things working, how to smooth out processes. And now there's 864 institutions over that, actually, in the network right now, today, live. Of those, Jack Henry's got 364 signed agreements and 265 of those live. So that's a great. I mean, one year, right?
One-year run, and you see that kind of uptick. Now, that's on FedNow. Other side of that, right, is the RTP solution. I said we'd come back, and we'd look at that 2023 date again. But first things first, from an RTP network perspective, that was launched in 2017, November of 2017. The volumes obviously have grown, but that thing's been out there for five and a half years longer than FedNow, right? But RTP transaction volume grew by 41%, starting in July 2023. So if you look at where it was in July 2023, when FedNow launched, it's picked up 41% in that timeframe. So tremendous growth there. 13% of the total dollars are consumer transactions that flow through RTP, and 87% are commercial.
From a Jack Henry perspective, we've got 417 agreements, with 308 of those installed already and running through the network. Now, along that same lines, in the payments realm, you know, we acquired Payrailz. So lots of activity has been going on with Payrailz, but we've been busy pulling together all of these components, what we had, plus what we bought, into a single platform. We call this internally it's the Journey to One, and what we'll be launching is the Payrailz Payments Platform. Not to be confused with PPP, but on the lending side, but this is the new platform. The idea behind the platform, it's a singular platform that removes the disjointed nature of all of the different components working independently. We're centralizing and integrating rails for both funding and disbursements....
in the same product, and we've got dynamic transaction routing for optimization. When you think about that, right, how can we get least cost routing? How can we get the payment there the fastest or the most efficient or the most cost-effective way for the customer? We got a modern payments experience, so think about the design behind it. We're using all the same design principles, so we get modern UI and modern UX. We want to remove that friction as best as possible. And then we've got, just from a security perspective, we've built this in with AI wrapped around the security components to monitor everything that's utilizing the system and to look at the analytics to help us ID fraud along the way.
The other thing to mention about this is we're far along in the process. We're wrapping up the coding in the first half of 2025, and we'll be delivering it in the second half of 2025. All right. Then we're gonna switch gears a little bit, and we're gonna go to internal use of AI. So we talked about the fact that we're using AI in a few different products, right? With Financial Crimes Defender, we got Feedzai as our solution partner there, working on that fraud piece. We're using several things that Ben will be talking about later on today. But internally, we want to use it as well. And Greg already mentioned the fact that we've given ourselves this tagline, this responsibly bold and balanced.
That's a big important piece of what we're doing, 'cause we do want to be out, we want to be aggressive, but we know there's a lot of risk that could be associated with it, too. There's a lot of unknown associated with it, and we've just got to be careful around that. So one of the things that we talked about is from a vision perspective, Greg said we found we root everything back into that vision statement. Well, it's really important that as we're taking this on, that we keep that in mind, that we keep the vision in mind, and we're continuing to advance our mission of being that well-rounded financial technology company, not deviating from that path.
So first thing that we did, right, we said, "Okay, we gotta go down that path, but we've got to build a framework, some principles around how we're going to operate with AI," right? Big critical piece of making sure we're doing the right thing and we're thinking about the future. What's it gonna be like? What are the results of this gonna be in two, three, four, five years that we don't necessarily know about yet, right? There's all sorts of litigation that's going on already related to it, related to how it's being used. So we built this framework, we put together a governance team, we tied it to our data governance components, and we put together this AI principles piece that we use to really review anything that we want to do.
If we got a new idea coming in, a new, a new use case, a new product that we're looking at, go back to these principles and how are we focused on them? How are we taking care of them? They guide the associates in their day-to-day operation, and they guide our product team as they design and develop new componentry. From an internal use case perspective, we got, we got several things that we're using for, I'll call it proof of concepts internally, but we do, we got business requirements as one. Excuse me. We got business requirements as one, and, from a how we're using the tools for business requirements, we've got a lot of SMEs, we got a lot of templates, we got a lot of ways that we want to keep these requirements documented.
And the act of doing that work, it might take one of our analysts six to eight hours to write a business requirement. By giving it the features that we need to build, but letting AI actually go out there and complete the business requirement document, we're taking that down to minutes, six to eight minutes from six to eight hours, right? So that's a huge, huge savings for us. Coding and test cases, so we actually can have it take business requirements and give us the initial code and give us test cases to be built around that. Code transformations, we can take languages and say, we want to convert from language A to language B, and let AI do that conversion, that transformation, and then get the human back involved to make sure that we're cleaning it up.
70% of the way, they can take care of it. We're picking up the last 30%. And then from an associate perspective, associate assist, we're helping us with our knowledge-based products, with our knowledge-based articles, helping us get to answers faster, helping us do research faster, right? A lot of what we end up doing ends up being researching use cases, researching different feature functionality capabilities of the systems, and helping our associates be more efficient and get to that answer quicker is a big piece of what we're doing. All right. One Jack Henry progress. Greg talked about this movement to One Jack Henry, and One Jack Henry being us being easier to work with, right? For our customers, for our prospects, for our partners, so we got a lot of different initiatives going on related to One Jack Henry. Thank you.
Related to One Jack Henry, excuse me. Hopefully, the bottom's not rounded, but all of them function around the four tenets that Greg already talked about, so these four tenets come into play. Wrap this with execution, right? Greg said. I got a T-shirt that says, "Execution." I got a tattoo that says, "Execution" as well. And we're gonna be executing on One Jack Henry around these different things. Transparency is one of those big pieces, so this is something that we talk about regularly, that we, you know, the ideal measurement of if we're being successful is if our customers are recognizing that change, that thing, whatever it is. We started publishing six-month roadmaps. Competition doesn't publish six-month roadmaps. They don't really publish roadmaps. So we've got these published out in our For Our Clients portal.
We publish six months at a time, and you can see we got a run rate back to July of 2021. But what we're doing there is we're saying, "Over the next six months, these are the things we're gonna build." Six months later, we publish the next roadmap. That next roadmap, we also hold ourselves accountable for the prior. What that means is, we said, "We are going to deliver these ten things. Did we deliver them? Yes or no? If we did, great. If we didn't, what are we gonna do about it?" And then publish the next six. We've been continuing to refine that.
First thing is, we went from almost zero. I think we had 12 documents that were out there that really weren't roadmaps, up to about 70 published roadmaps, but also, we've improved our percentage of completion. So we're running about 88.5% right now of what we say we're gonna do over that six months, we do. Second thing is, we've continued to kind of refine that reporting process. The reporting process, it's we tell it, like, on that roadmap, where did these ideas come from? Where did this feature come from? Did it come from our client base? Did it come from a regulation change?
Maybe it came from our Idea Lab , where our customers can actually put in new ideas and have their peers vote it up or vote it down as to whether we execute it on it or not. But that's all disclosed in that published roadmap. So we start talking to our clients. They're seeing this. They're starting to build their IT plans around it. When will they be doing integration? When will they be doing upgrades? When will they take advantage of a feature? Will they go out and buy a different product, or will they wait for ours? This is a key to that. They're starting to notice it. They're telling us that they're noticing it. Other things that we're really, really focused on, we talk about all of the acquisitions that have occurred over time.
One of the key things that we use to communicate with our clients is our CRM solution. So we are in the process of updating our CRM solution to Salesforce CRM across the organization, both sales and in operations, so everybody's got the same tool set and the same view of kind of one version of the truth that's out there. We've been working on Knowledge-Centered Services and Knowledge-Centered Services are allowing us to reduce the amount of time it takes to solve a case. So from the time when a client logs a case till the time that they've got a solution, Knowledge-Centered Services has allowed us to shrink that down. We're just at the beginning of it, but we're seeing great progress so far. We're focusing also on the ease of doing business with us. We talk about O ne Jack Henry.
A big piece of that is being easier to do business with, but focus on that, specifically, measuring it specifically based on a voice of the customer and how we're doing there. Those surveys that we send out, the feedback that we get, are all critical to it. But then we talk about comprehensive voice of the customer. That's taking all of those different pieces and bringing them back into a one synthesized view of what we're doing for that customer, for that group, for that product integration, whatever it might be, but those things are now starting to inform the next action that we take, right? So I think that's important to our future. And I think that is it. So any questions? Back here.
Just to follow up on some of the commentary around the internal deployment of-
Yeah
... AI. Sounds like a lot of efficiency.
Yes.
Have you guys started to put numbers around any of this? I mean, is this moving the needle, you know?
We've-
on cost saves in the next couple of years? Or just anything rough, you know, ways to think-
Yeah, I don't have any rough numbers at this point, but, yeah-
Okay
... we definitely have from a, like, from a proof of concept, we have actually seen activities that are happening today that are taking, you know, measured in hours, that we can measure now in minutes or, or sub-hours. So it's a matter of, can we turn that actually into production versus a proof of concept, and then start measuring what the, what the result would be.
The only thing I'll add is that we did build into our plans this year for every part of the organization. They had specific targets and dollars to go hit. B ut it is our first year of going through that process, but they all have targets and dollars that are part of the plan that you have already heard in the guide.
So some of these initiatives go into production before the end of this fiscal year, or is that TBD?
Well, to achieve what Greg just said.
Yeah
... some of them are gonna have to.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, so we have a whole host of use cases that have already been submitted, even six, eight months ago. So, back to the council that Shanon referenced, so there's a prioritization of those based on their ability to build efficiency for that particular group and build efficiency and effectiveness for our operational resilience. So, there's a combination of that. It could be something in the HR world that actually saves them a lot of time and maybe not having to add a body or two, that we would maybe prioritize over something else that, you know, had a longer term effect, but we needed to get this done faster. So things like that.
... Mm-hmm. I got two, okay. You got the mic.
I got the mic, so I get to talk. Follow-up, 'cause I had the same AI question, is whether there's ROIs attached to any of those projects. But you've got the principles set up, you've got, you know, some of the use cases set up. Is the challenge now that you're going through more getting the data organized?
Yeah.
Because you've got the Salesforce upgrade, you've got four different cores, and you've got a lot of history. It doesn't talk to each other. You gotta get all that organized.
Yeah.
Is that where the work is?
The data is. You're gonna hear Ben say it if you haven't heard him say it already, but no data, no AI, right? So yeah, the data, getting consistent data, getting the data cleansed in a way that we can use it, is really important. Data privacy, data security is also incredibly important, right? So we have all of those things taken into account. And then I think the other piece of it is around we'll. If we will only do work right now in a space where we've got our own. Our data is guaranteed to only be used for us, right? So we don't allow the data to get into somebody else's large language model. So it's our own LLM that has our own data private.
Do you have also cases where the operating staff are able to access all your customers' data to learn all of that?
We are not. No. Did you have a question still?
Thank you. I guess, you know, appreciate the commentary you provided regarding the different business sizes served by Banno Business and their different requirements. As Banno Business sits today, are there any product gaps that need to be filled to better serve on the larger side? I'm assuming, you know, just given the increased complications that are there, that half, you know-
Yeah
... have to be on the roadmap going forward.
I mean, I would say it this way: in the digital space, we're gonna continue to add capabilities. So yeah, there's things that we know about today that we need to continue to add. They're on a roadmap, they're getting built, they're getting delivered. I think there's gonna continue to be things that come out that we need to address, that we need to continue to build on.
Yeah, the only thing I'll add there, and Ben's gonna cover a little bit of digital in his presentation, but just to be very transparent, there are some additional gaps we have, we know to be able to chase down some things that, say, Q2 or Alkami have. But we have a roadmap, and we have an execution plan to get that done over the next six to eight months, so we're not that far behind, but again, just being transparent in that. The good news is that because of our customer base and because of our ability to now execute, they believe in those abilities to bring that to fruition.
And so that's why you're seeing the number of contracts being signed, regardless of what they see maybe potentially as a gap today, 'cause they know the gap won't be there long.
Just to add on to what Greg is saying, we believe we're building a world-class treasury system for our large commercial clients, and we had a lot of success there. That's a very difficult product to build. I'm sure if any of you understand that product space, you'll understand, and we have been actively closing all of those large gaps over the last two years, with a lot of success in our customer base, and we have some very large customers now that have very large commercial customers, big, large Fortune 500 brand names that are using our products now, so there's a lot of success there, and we're just gonna continue to do that on the large space.
And on the other side of the spectrum, that's. That was your question on the large space. On the smaller side of the space, that's what we're gonna talk about here in a while. So...
Thank you. Any other questions? If not, then I get to invite Ben up to the stage, so thank you.
Hard not to trip. It's good to be with you all. It's one of my favorite days of the year to hang out with you all. I also love hanging out with you afterwards, so super fun conversations. Y'all are super smart. You ask lots of really smart questions, and so we're gonna cut through a lot of things today. We're in dangerous territory 'cause Vance told me I had extra time. But I'm gonna do my best to really land the airplane here so we can get done at a good time. Okay, so I think you know this about us, the United States is not a better place without our community financial institutions. So what we're really up to is helping them punch above their weight, okay? We talked a lot about One Jack Henry and improving...
This slide, when you read it, think what we say to our customers. So our One Jack Henry experience is about improving their experience with us, right? And we really do. You heard it a lot today, but we really do view ourselves as the Ritz-Carlton of service for this industry. We are the top-of-the-food-chain service provider, and if you ever had a chance to see how this executive team and all of the teammates, you know, in our groups, swarm and service customers, it's amazing thing to see. And it's really fun for a technologist like me to get to build in this space, so it's a good day to be a Jack Henry. We're gonna talk a lot about the Origin program. Origin is a program name.
That program is, has one singular mission, and that is to improve the account holder's experience at the financial institution. Singular. To improve the account holder's experience at the financial institution. Increasingly, that experience is digital, okay? We're gonna talk a little bit about what digital means. To kind of talk through this, like, piece by piece, first, we're modernizing and improving our existing core cores, integration layers, data and reporting layers. We're gonna talk in detail about all those things, and we're gonna talk about why that will matter to you as investors or potential investors. Shared services. This gets into disciplined capital allocation, right? Like, making sure that when we make a decision to build a thing, that we're not ever building that twice.
You heard from Greg and Mimi and Shanon that the things that we have all collected over the years, a lot of those collections of extra things that we have, like the multiple wire systems and the multiple ACH system and those things, came via the magical period that Dave ran when we acquired a lot of companies. We got a lot of stuff that collected through that. Now what we're doing is converging all that to one platform. That leads to cost savings over time. The last thing, which is, I think, the hardest thing for our customers and really everybody to get their heads around, is we're gonna converge digital and core, and we're gonna talk a little bit more about that.
the end of the day, what we're trying to do is just improve the overall digital front door for the financial institution, okay? That's what we're doing. How we do that? Public cloud modernization, all kinds of technical stuff. My joke is insert large amount of LinkedIn word salad here, right? Bunch of fancy words that really just means that we're all going through a big transition. Jack Henry's going through a big transition, we're in which we now service the front door for our customers. Cloud location of traditional workloads, you're like, "Well, Ben, what does that word salad mean?" What that means is we're gonna improve the user experience, okay, on device and their interaction with the bank or the credit union. That's what that means. Speed of light actually matters.
Data, AI, and analytics, we're gonna talk about plenty here in a minute, and then large strategic partnerships. Jack Henry has a size advantage that we're in which we are able to go do some really amazing, incredible things, you know, for our customers. And so we talk. I think you all know, we have a phenomenal Google partnership. We announced that two years ago. So what I'm gonna do in this next segment is I'm just gonna basically update you from last year. So things that I talked to you about last year, these are just gonna be kind of updates. Last year at this time, we had not moved all of our infrastructure yet into GCP. All right? We are now large and in charge and running a lot of infrastructure in GCP.
The big move was actually the Banno Digital Platform. We moved twelve point four million users in four hours with zero interruptions. And by the way, I really want to give Google a shout-out. They've been an amazing partner, literally blown us away. After we, you know, signed the contract two years ago, it's just been a increasing partnership, and we really think that what we bring to the table, Jack Henry plus Google, will help our customers in an immensely, you know, major way. So, you know, to brag on the team that I get to go to work for every day, they moved that in four hours with no interruptions. Google actually wants to do some case study and work on that, right? So they're so impressed with what our cloud team is able to do.
More migrations are in process, like, we'll talk about those, but there's a lot of modernization that's happening. With Google, we get world-class security optionality, lots of geeky stuff to talk about there. If you've got questions, we can talk about that afterwards. We have infrastructure for our new data platform and AI, analytics and reporting, and then, you know, obviously, you know, what we're doing with large language models. So this is just a model, a mental model for your own thinking cap for how this... You guys saw these slides last year. We now have the Google Cloud P latform firmly in place as a foundational element for what we're building for our customers. That is deeply and intrinsically connected to the existing core systems we have, and that is what makes Jack Henry different, okay?
We're not building something on the side, and we'll talk about that in a minute. Update on our Finicity partnership. This is phenomenal. This is so critical and crucial for our customers. As I kind of layer up these partnerships, think, like, this is foundational. So we're just building in new layers of foundation, okay? When we talk about Finicity, this is awesome from a retail perspective, but it's gonna be huge for a small business. All right? Let me talk about the problem. When we talk to our customers about the challenge, in nineteen eighty-nine, okay, this was my parents in nineteen eighty-nine. Here's the choice: Bank of America or a community financial institution or maybe a regional, okay? Now, this is the choice that my son faces, okay? Now, the fintech ecosystem has exploded.
What we believe Jack Henry is capable of doing with large, great partnerships like this, is we can now turn our financial institutions back into a hub with something like Finicity, all right? That's now fully deployed and available. We wanna turn our financial institutions into a hub. Remember this when we talk small business, 'cause this technical modernization, you hear tech mod or technology modernization, this has a specific mission, which is to then bring deposits back to our customer base, okay? And allow them to be a hub, which then they succeed. Back to Greg's comments, Jack Henry, you know, Dave has propagated this, right? And, and, like, our customers win, we win, then you win, right? We all win. Okay, we talked about this last year, open banking.
Most people just kinda fall asleep and, you know, they just roll their eyes, open banking, what does this mean, and why does this matter? You're gonna learn why this matters today when we talk about what we're doing with Moov. These are... We were the first platform at our scale to completely remove screen scraping. People are like: "Well, why does that matter? Nobody cares. I'll send you a Nobody Cares T-shirt." Well, you're gonna find out why, because we now have Intuit connecting directly via API for their products straight to our platform. All right, we also added Stripe and Visa this year. All right? So these partners, and by the way, there's a whole pipeline of these that are now connecting to this platform that we built for Jack Henry.... This is a foundational layer.
If you don't have this, there are things you cannot build that then will allow for innovation and new products to be built in the future, unless you have this. Greg alluded to this, but I think still, in our world, this is the only self-service API where in which you get access to a full stack from digital all the way through to core. You literally can click a button and get an API key. All right? We've issued 5.5 million API tokens. It's actually more than that. That is increasing every day. Our goal with this platform here is to be as good as the large API providers from a user experience. We want fintechs to be able to come and begin to work on behalf of our customers without any friction from Jack Henry.
This is a major part of our strategy because that means there's things that Greg was alluding to, like, there's things that we won't have to build. We wanna be good at this, not in the particular feature sets or things that other people can come along and do on behalf of our customers, so this is enabling innovation. People have asked me about marketplace. We will build eventually, okay? No, I'm not giving you any timing, but we will eventually build a marketplace on top of this, but this is the foundation. We think this is the thing everybody has missed. Everybody jumped to marketplace, they don't have this, okay? So this is a really big deal. Consistently, I talk to a lot of fintechs. It's part of what I spend my time doing. They love our platform most. We hear it a lot.
There's things they want us to do. They want a marketplace, they want more access to our customers, they want more things, they want more access to our UIs and other things, and those things are gonna be coming, right? But this is us building a user experience for these financial technology companies. You gotta remember, I was one. Dave bought... Dave and Greg decided it was a good idea to buy us, right? And so I was on the outside, and what we're really trying to do, mission, sort of big mission inside the company, is we wanna make it easier for Ben, the geek fourteen years ago, that was hammering code into a computer with Wade in an office. We wanna make it easier and better for them to build products on our platform.
That builds a robust ecosystem for our customers, and our customers buy more software from us. Okay, open banking. Again, I'm gonna keep building up this model in your mind for how this thing actually works, okay? So we have that core down below. That would be one of our cores. This platform, by the way, is connected natively to all cores. You'll understand why that's important in a minute. The Google platform is there, and then you have the optionality. You've heard Dave and Greg say this many, many times, but we're giving our customers optionality to opt into, opt into this platform. Open banking is just a layer on top of all that, okay? You know, like, "Well, Ben, why does that matter?" Well, you're about to see. The next thing that people keep asking about: "Well, you're building a digital core.
Why would you do that, and why does that matter?" All right? And you know, our customers ask me this, too. So this is just a fast run on the word digital. I actually really hate it. I hate the word digital 'cause it doesn't mean anything, and that's kind of defined here. You know, this is a great book, by the way. You should order it for your coffee table. Steve Jobs hired a photographer to follow him around in the eighties when he was building NeXT. This is after he left Apple. And I just wanna point out that the digital revolution, evidently, according to this book, happened in Silicon Valley between nineteen eighty-five and two thousand. It also was the digital revolution that Jack and Jerry were doing, right? The digital revolution actually happened then.
What in the world are we talking about when we say digital banking, right? This doesn't make any sense. This is Steve. My favorite picture in the book is Steve making a list of the things that are still analog, right? And he's got the stuff that's digital. What is he doing? It's the same thing Jack and Jerry were doing in the early stages of Jack Henry, right? Like, moving things from analog world into digital world. That built this amazing company that I get to come work for every day. Okay, what I think the definition is, and I think I have a lot of agreement on this from both our customers and the general industry, is that really, when we say it in banking, we literally mean demand for self-service via the internet. That begins in nineteen ninety-four, okay?
Last year, my question is: Did demand for self-service via the internet for our customers go up or down? Any guesses? Right, Captain Obvious part of the presentation, right? So then the question is: Does it go up or down in twenty twenty-four? All right, I get that this is Captain Obvious, but then let's talk about 2025. Does it go up or down? Does it go up or down? This is kind of our dialogue we're having internally, right, amongst our teams, and our dialogue that we're having with customers. Okay, so if that's the case, then really what happens is this demand for digital self-service joins with the growth curve of the financial institution, okay? And then we are utterly linked to that. Makes sense, all right? Okay, that means every one of our customers becomes a digital bank or credit union eventually.
Now, I'm not smart enough to know exactly when exactly that happens, but I hate this metaphor. We're skating to where the puck is going to be, okay? We have to skate to where that puck is gonna be. Just a fun thing about why I hate that metaphor: Have you ever seen a hockey player skate to where the puck isn't? Right. Okay, it's a terrible metaphor. Okay, so to sort of further articulate this, you know, will you have more or fewer digital users next year? We think eventually, everybody is 100% digital user, okay? And we see this. Actually, we have a credit union who came to me and said, "Ben, we need to make everyone at our credit union be a digital user on Banno." Okay, that happened a couple years ago.
We're seeing more and more demand for that, okay? So it doesn't mean branches, and everybody's like: "Well, what's gonna happen to branches?" Those are gonna evolve. Like, I'm again, that's, like, that's going to happen, and there'll be magical, interesting evolutions that happen with our banks and credit unions. But, like, if you look on the left, this is what Wade and I were doing, trying to connect here from the outside and working on top of a core system that was designed for a teller experience. And then we built this thing over on your left, this is on my right. I gotta get that right. And we run into what we call the red pipe problem. And then what happened in the industry, I think most of you are aware of what's going on in the industry.
Now, this is the evolution of side cores, okay? So now, like, there's a long list of these. This list is not comprehensive, and I just wanna be really clear, we really respect what these people are doing. This is not, like, us throwing any shade, but it creates a problem for customers. There's no integration to the existing core system that runs the bank or the credit union. There's no integration. The bank or credit union then has to have a separate security team, separate compliance team, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You see? So then the costs are escalating at the financial institution. That should be obvious that that's not great, okay? Again, I think these things... And what were they trying to solve? They're trying to solve that experience on the internet side. And then there's been all kinds of different challenges.
By the way, big banks are doing this, and the small ones are doing it, too. Okay, this is not just, like, our ecosystem challenge. This is a really important thing to understand. All core systems were all designed and built before the internet, the ones that can actually run a whole financial institution. They're all designed before the internet. Okay, so then what we're saying is, "Hey," you've heard Dave say this a lot, but just to review, right? We're building a system that integrates directly with the existing core systems that run our financial institutions today. And then optionally, those executive teams and those teams can make a choice, okay, as we continue to innovate and bring these solutions to market. Now, question: if we build this exact same feature set that they have today, are they gonna move? No. We have to innovate, okay?
We have to innovate. We have to bring new things, right? Okay, that gets us to this perfect world where in which we have this shared services platform, right? Which again, just to give you, like, a quick intuition for why this part's important, we're doing a lot of building new products inside this company. You see it, right? In Greg's presentation and Shanon's presentation, et cetera. A quick example for Financial Crimes Defender. They're using Origin services today in production with those 170+ clients that they're going live with, okay? So that's part of the outcome of us building these shared services. We ended up building something once, for all new products to use. We're also building an identity platform. We have an API gateway. We have an open banking platform.
We don't need two of any of those things, right? So then everybody's using the shared service platform. Again, discipline capital allocation into shared services. I'll let you read through this. You know, I'm not. I'm gonna just touch on a few highlights that I think will you'll want to know. We're in mid-rollout for wires. Wires is a tremendously challenging product to roll out. It's a big change, but a lot of really early success. So we have live wires going right now with a customer that's running actually two of our core systems, funny enough. It's also deeply integrated with Banno. Also, this platform is integrating also our partners. Our other online banking partners have already integrated with it. That goes back to JackHenry.dev, right? Okay, so they can integrate to this platform as it rolls out.
We talked about authorization, role-based access for financial crimes in Banno. So Banno's taking these dependencies, too. It's. We'll get into this in a little bit, but Banno is a massive lever for this company. Runs on 10,000 Kubernetes pods in GCP, okay? That is where, that infrastructure is where we are building out all of these new shared services, origin, wires, et cetera. So now, the way to think of it, if you want a simplified view, is like Banno gets a core, okay? Or, like, we're just building out a core system inside this digital platform. This. As an investor, you should just view in your mind this is just one big, massive lever, 'cause there's a bunch of stuff we don't have to build because we already built it with Banno. New integration capabilities enabled for payments and digital.
You're gonna see some of that when Wade and I discuss SMB. Analytics and reporting, shared security infrastructure for the security team. We now have consolidated infrastructure for security. A lot of other things here that are really important. Now, I kinda hinted at this a minute ago. Banno was acquired in two thousand and fourteen, and then, you know, what we did that's kind of like. It wasn't. We didn't mean for it to be a secret so much as we just did it. We built Banno again from scratch inside the company, okay? And we took it from 400,000 users in two thousand and eighteen to 12.4, okay? It's actually 12.6. I just checked the numbers for August. And big part of that was first-in-class cloud-native platform.
You know, L- insert LinkedIn word salad here, modern API access, yada, yada, yada, native apps. To this, to this date, I believe we are the only one hundred percent native app deployed for mobile banking, currently in our ecosystem. That could be slightly wrong. We'll have to... But as far as I know. Banno Conversations, this was a huge breakthrough. You gotta remember, we had to figure out how to help our customers compete on service, relationships, and trust. Most people bought Banno because of this specific feature. Okay, so why does that matter? We're now taking that feature, we're dropping the Banno name, and it becomes Jack Henry Conversations. If, okay, our customers are going digital, they're gonna need a digital self-service platform. Think they need a help desk just built into the software. Nobody's ever done that before.
We were the first ones to do it. It's just built in. Why? So that they can continue to differentiate, and they'll continue to choose us as they make this digital journey. Inside that, there's a huge challenge that they face with scaling their own people. You were asking about our optimizations. I think it was a good question about how we're optimizing cost structure with AI. We believe this right here is a huge cost structure optimization for our customers. This is now live at one of our financial institutions. We announced this at Jack Henry Connect last year. It's live. It's being used heavily by support staff to augment, okay? So these are AI assistants that help them service customers.
These are incredibly challenging way more challenging to build than, like, reading about AI on X or YouTube, than people can imagine. But we've achieved some amazing breakthroughs in really establishing the voice of the customer and tuning what we do on a financial institution-specific basis. Huge breakthroughs. Even some of our partners were wildly impressed by what we've been able to do so far. That gives an assistant to the financial institution now to keep servicing digital customers, right? Now, you've got a very smart assistant that can operate after hours. We are also building an assistant inside Banno, okay? So you have a customer that's gonna be on your left, right, and then you have an advisor at the bank or the credit union on the right. They both have AI assistants. All right? Okay.
We're heading into a world where in which this kind of... I really believe this is probably one of the biggest opportunities for us to help our customers optimize what they're gonna go be able to do. All right? Okay, now we get to do, like, the boring part. No data, no AI. It just. I don't know why this gets lost on everyone, but, like, literally, I don't care how magical the LLM, how big it is, and how many parameters, and how cool the UI looks, if you don't give it data, it won't work. So we, as a company, decided that we wanna be a world-class player in data analytics and prepare for what we believe is a coming army of fintech that's gonna bring AI features to our customers.
We feel like we were a leader in open banking at jackhenry.dev and getting our APIs made available for fintech, like on the Banno platform, and then bringing the rest of the company into that same ecosystem and all that. But now it's time for us to work on this. Now, this is the boring part. Like, how do you do that? We don't think anybody has really cracked this. We call this Data Broker. By the way, this is currently in rollout. I think we're live. I checked yesterday, 13 customers. All right? And it's probably one of the most in-demand products that we've ever been in a launch mode for because it's kind of give you an intuition for this, we're getting all of the core data in, into the system, all of our digital data, all of our payments data, okay?
All of our complementary product data, and this will be the first time we've had convergence of data to a single place for our customers. Now, they'll be able to do basic reporting. We have an amazing reporting engine that we built for them, and that's gonna all be productized. This is, again, a shared service. Think shared service, think optimizing cost structure, long-term gains, when it comes to margin expansion. As we do this, all of our products that we're building, that you've seen in Shanon and Greg's presentation, all those are gonna use this platform. Now, there's a couple special things about this that are really cool. If our customers wanna completely own and control their data, they can. This is enabled via GCP and the amazing data stack that Google provides for us to then provide to our customers.
So what we are basically saying, so again, we'll just remove all the technical jargon. We're offering a vault in the sky for our customers' data, and if they so choose, we don't have access to it. They run it. So one of the things we heard from customers for a long time is, "Hey, we want access to our, to our own data." Well, okay, now you have it. We're gonna give you a vault in the sky that we know how to run, that's under our regulatory, you know, duress, okay? Regulatory duress is important in this ecosystem, right? So it's under our regulatory duress, and they can run it and have the keys if they want. If they don't, we can run that for them, all right? Now, this gets them into the AI ecosystem, okay?
We think that the GCP platform is one of the most powerful, AI platforms available, in part because they're very friendly to the other providers, as you can see. But if we have a customer... So our first Data Broker customer is actually a Snowflake customer, okay? It was building GPT- on GPT-4, okay, in Azure. My joke is we're Honey Badger. We don't care, okay? We don't care. If you wanna build that way, this is great. Data Broker can get you the data to where you need it to be. People ask me, "Well, is this a data warehouse, you know, strategy?" It's like, "No." Could it be? Yes. If you want it to be, yes, but basically, no. It's about how we're allowing data to be brokered.
There will be customers who want us to just productize this, and they just wanna use the cool dashboards we're gonna build, which we'll show you in a second. And then there'll be customers that are saying, "We wanna run this ourselves." Our first customer, right? I called that customer, by the way, and, I go: "Is there anything else you need from us?" Like, this is our literally first customer for Data Broker, and he's like, "Ben, I'm over the moon. Like, I'm over the moon. I can't think of anything." Like, so early days still for this. We're still learning how we productize this for our customers, how we operationalize it and those things, but this is gonna be a big-time, awesome thing for us. We ourselves are building products on top of it, okay?
So we have to do this, and I'll show you an example here in a minute. So we're building a lot. I've touched on our AI Assist projects, but we're also building analytics. The next thing that's super important, we have, we believe, the best open banking platform that's been built so far, with all of those partnerships we discussed. Like, by the way, the. A lot of times in this industry, it's not the technology that's the hardest, and this is why I love working with Greg and Dave and the team, is our ability to go get deals done with Plaid and Intuit. How long did those deals take, Greg? A couple years. A couple years. So like, there's, like, our ability to go get these deals done with these providers. The Intuit deal took a long time, okay? Like, these others took a long time.
So there's this barrier to entry, so we're kind of building this moat. We do think that'll probably get easier over time as open banking expands and some of the regulatory control come into place. But all of that said, we pioneered that, and you'll understand why in a minute. Now, we believe the next place the puck is going, okay, is data access for AI fintechs. So fintechs, there's gonna be an army of fintechs coming to solve all kinds of problems in our ecosystem. An army. And we want to allow, build a beautiful foundation for our customers to enable their own data to be used, okay, with new products. I kind of put this in there. This is a bit wordy, but, like, why does modern data access matter? So building AI products on top of APIs is not a thing.
You can, it's just not optimal. So what we're doing is we're enabling this data platform to be used, and you can think of it like, as a, as an, an augmentation of our API strategy for a data strategy. All right? So I'll let you read that at your own discretion. This gets us into products that we're building on top of this. So Executive Insights, Jack Henry Executive Insights, I think, is the formal name. We've been through a number of names. I'm having trouble making sure I keep the right name on my tongue. But, so one of the things we have, and I have a whole presentation about this, but we've been studying our financial institutions. We've been on the ground. We have a whole UX and design team.
And just as a side note, if you go to jackhenry.design, you'll see our design system that we're building for the company, okay? Again, think of that as, like, again, us just modernizing all of our applications into this design space, but then we're also studying our customers. And one of the things we found is that they have an incredible opportunity to optimize what they do and how they make decisions inside the bank or the credit union. As a really quick example, we talked to a very small bank in Colorado, and they had seven people who had other jobs at the bank, who were doing all kinds of little, like, data work and reporting work and building spreadsheets and doing Cognos reports and kind of cobbling things together.
We realized, "Hey, we can solve this problem." This is early-stage look at our Executive Insights dashboard. All right? Notice on your left, you see AI Assist. What's really important to understand about reporting and data analytics is that the ability to write SQL is now, like, a solved problem, okay? Also, your requirement to understand any kind of data model, also gone, okay? Our executives at our financial institutions should be able to quickly get to what they need. This is some of the research examples. I just included it for your own light reading leisure. These are the types of people we're talking to. This is kind of how it plays out in our product. Now, this gets us to the next thing.
We don't think anybody has built a core processing system or a modern one where in which analytics is just built in, it's just part of the feature set, right? So we had a chief banking officer, who we know really well, and he was just like, "Well, I don't really do anything with the system." And we showed him this, and he was like: "I'll use that." So super cool. Again, like, there's so many key technological breakthroughs that are happening right now that are gonna change the way products look, work, and feel in our entire ecosystem, and we wanna be ahead of that curve, not behind it. All right? Okay, this is just my way of saying, you know, we wanna build the ability for these executives to fly this airplane, okay?
If you think of the financial institution as an airplane, they're flying it, right? You sit down and talk to them, they're flying this thing, and we really wanna give them the best tools at their fingertips. Okay, so kind of to recap, and then also talk a little bit more about how the AI systems and infrastructure and architecture work, all right, is you have our core system. This would be Symitar or SilverLake or CIF 20/20 or Core Director. You have the Google platform, right? You all understand that. You have the Jack Henry platform, right, which is where we're building the products, but this is the next thing. Okay? This is AI integration and LLM augmentation. All right? How's that work? Well, we're building out general ledger right now, okay?
We already have some really cool, like, just pure technical breakthroughs in terms of it being real time and all that sort of thing. But when we think about analytics, there's no reason why predictive analytics for a general ledger just wouldn't be built into the product. You follow? All right. Then, if that's the case, those predictive analytics... By the way, you can't do tabular prediction or time series prediction in an LLM yet. You may be able to do that in the future, but you can't today. So then that feeds the LLM, and then that's then available in the product. Okay, this is the pattern you will see us building on for the entire digital core, okay? That entire user experience. So this is kind of Jack Henry on the left, the rest of the ecosystem on the right, okay?
Like, we're thinking hard about this space and how we help our customers go compete. I thought I'd include some of the UI components for you, that are kind of making their way into customers' hands soon, and just notice at the top, everything has AI assist on every screen, okay? Like, by the way, search, sort, filter is like a job that happens insanely a lot at a bank or a credit union. That's a solved problem, all right? So I included this, so you could just kind of see. It's just so helpful to see. You know, it's like I've been showing architecture diagrams and, like, how the platform's gonna work, but, like, it's just once our customers start to see these kinds of views, they're like: "Oh, wow! I...
Oh, it's now coming to life." So that's literally what's been happening since we talked to you all last year. The software is coming to life. We are rethinking how the actual back office and front office at a financial institution work, right? It's just, like, super boring stuff to go sit in the front office or back office of a bank or a credit union and watch what happens, right? But it's where all the magic is. Wade and I refer to it as going down the stack to solve the problems at the financial institution. These are problems that, back in the day, Jack and Jerry and then their incumbent teams that came along, they were at the bank or the credit union, just listening to a CEO go, "Change that," and they would change it, because that was, like, a really fast loop.
Hard for us to have that fast of a loop at 7,100 employees and associates, but we're rebuilding that loop as part of our technology modernization. This is gonna sound rabbit trail-y, but I wanted to also talk about your question. What I thought I heard was just, like, operationalization as these new sales come in. One of the things we're looking at. Not looking at, we're actually building this in. I didn't put a slide in for this because I just worry it's too boring. But with this stack that I just walked you through, we're gonna get a huge lever in actually building what we're calling Auto Tenant. It's what you experience if you deploy any platform in any business whatsoever in a modern multi-tenant SaaS way. We're still gonna have data conversion.
We're still gonna have the relationship side that we build with the bank or the credit union while we go do those conversions. But you can see this happening at Banno. How many of you have been a little bit surprised at the pace of install for Banno? Like, if you monitor that. That is a function of our automation that we've been slowly building in Banno. So we're almost, roughly speaking, about 70%-80% fully automated for what I now call install in quotes. I'm gonna get a T-shirt that says install in quotes, 'cause it's. We're not installing software anymore. What we're doing is building a tenant, and then every tenant has a lot of what I just call knobs and levers. Those knobs and levers are just things that happen in the software that different customers want to be different, right?
Thresholding, entitlements, like access to this, who gets access to that, how the app looks, all that kind of stuff, and we're taking all that and building automation for that. That should provide a pretty powerful lever for us in the future. All of Origin is being built that way, too. Now, that does not mean that this... to be more specific, this will allow us to double down on our service culture. All right? This will allow us to keep working to build that competitive moat that we already have, because now our people can keep building tighter iterative relationships with our customers. And the actual, I think what you were poking at is, like, okay, how are you gonna scale headcount? We think we can start to solve that over a longer frame of time here as we build all these new products.
Okay, this is kind of like an envisioning of what happens in the software in the future. We're moving from a system that requires humans to go work on it, to a system that tells me that, all right, and we're done and into questions, and I smoked the time. Smoked it. So I'm gonna get you out of here. That's my contribution to your ability to drink later. Yes, sir.
Hi, Ben. Chuck Nabhan from Stephens. Just wanted to understand one of your earlier comments a little better, specifically around using Banno as a lever to build other solutions and products. Was hoping you could put a finer point, maybe give an example-
Yeah, yeah.
of what that could potentially mean.
I can, for sure. So Banno Conversations is a good one. We needed to build a conversational type inbox for back office, front office in Origin. We're just gonna use Banno Conversations for that. We're gonna take that technology, and we're gonna use it for that. More nerdy one would be API Gateway. So one of the things about financial services gateways and open banking platforms, we built a really good one. A lot of people have asked me, like: "Well, why didn't you use one of the cloud providers?" They literally don't have the features we need that'll meet the regulatory demand. So we have our own API gateway. We're not rebuilding an API gateway for the new core system. Also, we have an identity platform that we built for Banno.
This is gonna be super nerdy, but just hang in there with me. It's a weird, like, fun fact, like, at the core level, because it was built pre-internet, we don't, the core doesn't know about the identity of the user, right? That's either in a Q2 system or a system like Banno. We took that, and we're building that into the core system with our authorizations and RBAC, and then all of our complementary products that use that get the same ID. You might say, "Well, Ben, that sounds super boring, and it sounds like a lot of LinkedIn word salad." And you, what you need to then realize is then our banks and credit unions are gonna know who these people are at any stage of the process that they're in with the bank or the credit union. These are huge advancements.
People don't normally think, like: "Why would I have an identity system in a core," right? I'll give you another one, maybe a more interesting one. Transactions. So Banno has a very robust transaction data store. It runs across multiple regions, because we think transaction data is maybe the most valuable data for our customers, right? For things like fraud, AI models, all kinds of features can be built on this. We have a long-term transaction data store that now is the Origin transaction data store. Does that make sense? So I wanna say more, but there's more stuff coming like that. There's just more and more taking, like, the things we already built. To say it another way, most of the online banking systems that connect to core systems end up building a mini core in their system. They have accounts, they have transactions, right?
They have all these things, and then the core has them, too. That creates this bifurcated experience. You're just talking to somebody who's got gray hair now, been doing this for 14 years, and, you know, I can just go for hours on this. But like, this is the advantage we have of building a digital platform inside the company and then building a new core to go with it. Back to let's talk apps really quickly. Whether they buy our apps is up to them. Like, we're gonna go compete, right? We've had success competing. You can see that in Banno. But if a customer wants Q2, this platform will be out-of-the-box better for Q2 over time.
So just to, if I could follow up quickly. So it sounds like what you could potentially build is narrowing the gap between the existing legacy core and some of these next-gen cores. And then I guess to take that a step further, you know, the value proposition to an FI would be that you don't have two vendors.
You got it.
You're saving cost. Okay.
You got it. As another example, I think this is, you know, something I can, you know, I think this is relatively well known. We have, for example, customers that run two of our cores. They run Symitar and SilverLake at the same time because they have features, two features. They got feature sets, for example, in commercial. And SilverLake is a world-class commercial core. World-class. Symitar doesn't have some of those commercial features, right? So then they buy both. Well, the new platform will actually bridge that for those customers that are doing that. So they're like, they're just gonna get win after win after win with us in getting this consolidated cost structure, you know, for themselves. And complexity and then leads to them hiring more people and all those kinds of things. Good questions.
I wanna ask about Banno and you kind of as far as it relates to the bank and engaging with customers, and let me preface this. I've been surprised to see some of the largest banks talking about plans to build more branches, more physical branches, as part of their customer acquisition and retention strategies. And so I completely understand what you're saying in terms of, like, customer engagement on the digital side, but if... Is this something that you think we're going to see, where you're gonna essentially need more of an omni-channel or something that'll bridge both?
Yeah.
How does Banno potentially tie into that for your customers?
Great question. I skipped this part 'cause I was worried it'd be too boring, but so if you think about servicing a customer, and I'm a good example, I'm primarily gonna be a digital customer, but I do go into my local branches for different things a couple times a year. But that happens more than you probably even know or understand, and so what happens is you have this back-office system, like the core system. They've selected some vendor to do digital, right, and one of the things, yes, we're giving this beautiful digital experience, but what you saw on those screens is an omni-channel back-office experience. That's our big trick, if you will. Very hard to do. A way to give you an intuition for this, if you go to any call center at a...
It doesn't matter what size the bank or credit union is, they're gonna have, at minimum, two monitors, most of the time, four. These call centers look like trading desks. Why? Because they have bifurcated back-office systems to service the customer. And then they have new problems of like, well, I'm at a counter at a new branch. By the way, we see some of the new branch stuff, like we've got a really cool customer doing some cool stuff with branch expansion. So again, we're not saying no branch. What we're saying is, hey, they're gonna be more primary digital. Their, all their customers will be digital, and they'll still be coming into branches. And so then how do you solve that problem? And that omni-channel word has been often used to articulate account opening.
Like, I start an account opening experience here, I get stuck, so I just go in. Things like that. And by the way. That strategy is getting not just executed in our new core system, it's getting executed for our account opening system, right? So that entire LoanVantage, JHA OpenAnywhere ecosystem that's being built, they're doing the same thing. Also, I didn't mention this, but they're going to use Banno Conversations. It's now going to be called Jack Henry Conversations, right? So back to your question earlier, like give me examples, like JHA OpenAnywhere is going to use the Conversations platform to help people open accounts, and then that gets you that omni-channel experience back through. Good question. Any other questions? Really appreciate y'all. I'm gonna. I think we're at break. Is that right, Vance?
I think at this point, we are running a little bit ahead of schedule, but we were scheduled to take a fifteen-minute break before the panel discussion, so we're going to stay with a fifteen-minute break. I've got, it's just after 3:15 P.M. Why don't we make it 3:35 P.M. back in here, and we'll start back up a little bit early to talk about the SMB strategy. Thanks.
I'm good? Okay. All right. Are we hot? Check one, check two, check one. We good? Okay. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the SMB panel, where we're going to be talking about and unpacking a press release that we sent out earlier this week. It was entitled Simplifying Small Business or Simplifying Digital Payments for Small Business... and we've got some really exciting things to share, give you a little bit more color and detail on that announcement, how it ties to some of the strategies and the projects and the builds that we've been covering in the first part of the afternoon. My name is Lee Wetherington, and I am Senior Director of Corporate Strategy at Jack Henry.
Everyone here knows Ben, of course, and we have with us today Mr. Wade Arnold, who is the Co-founder and CEO of Moov. Before we get into the proper of the discussion, these guys go back a way and have a very special relationship personally, but also professionally in terms of building things. And I will tell you, I don't normally say this out loud. These are considered to be two of the brightest preeminent minds and builders in fintech, period. End of story. And so anytime you're around them or you have a chance to be around them together, it's a very special thing, and now they're building together again, and we're here to talk about some of that.
But before we get to all of that, I wanted to take us back in a time machine to 2012 at Finovate in New York City, where-
That's where we met Greg.
Yeah. Yeah, actually, that's exactly-
Yeah
... that's exactly right. So I just wanna tee this up, and you guys give everybody just a little peek into the history of and nature of your relationship, your friendship.
Go ahead. You start.
You had better at breakfast this morning.
Well, go ahead.
No.
You know, like, what we were doing here is kinda interesting. We had built an open banking platform. We had basically built an early version of Plaid. We had built a switch kit. We were just printing code and building products. One of the things I learned from Wade and working with him in those early years was just the importance of high-grade engineering and design. So we were building a lot of beautiful things, and nobody wanted to buy open banking. Nobody wanted to buy a big data platform at the time. Nobody cared about API first. Like, we were just too early, and so this is us literally after a short conversation with Greg Adelson saying, "Hey, could you build a mobile app?" and I was like,
Is that the way Greg talks?
No.
Okay.
That was how I probably heard it in my head, 'cause in my head, I was just like: That's the easiest thing I've ever heard of in my life. And so we took off, and we-
Yeah
... built, I think, the first mobile app in 90 days.
Yeah. Turned out not to be super easy.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Tell me about it. I got all the gray hair now through it. Was there anything you guys ... Like, I'm just curious, personally. Was there anything you guys, you know, back in those days, you're building stuff, you're printing code, like you said, you're having conversations about things that could be, things that you wanna see happen.
I think.
What were those conversations like?
I think what kind of has always bound us together is we always wanted to build digital experiences that delighted the end user. In order to do that, you have stacks of dependencies, and you have to kind of go down that. So, you know, this era, it was still called financial services. I know we're way cooler as fintech people now. But, you know, it was the proverbial lipstick on a pig, right? We are building the front end, and I think what's fun about where our careers, although, you know, we diverged, and he went into core banking, I went into payments, to build these delightful user experiences.
We both continued going down the stack in order to figure out exactly how to get the data, how to do that in a way that the end user is going to have the best digital banking experience.
Yeah. And then you guys, you guys built Banno together.
Yeah.
Yes.
And we've referred to that a couple of times-
Yeah
... here.
Yeah, my senior in high school, that was his imaginary friend's name was Banno. He thinks he built it, which is not true. Ben did. But at least I've been- I actually am on LinkedIn. Ben is not. So I will bring the word salad, and he'll bring the execution.
Nicely done. Nicely done.
Yeah.
Um, Wade-
Yeah, yeah
... tell us about Moov. For those of us in the room that don't know about Moov, what you do, what you're building, tell us, give us the thumbnail.
Yeah, so I think what's unique about Moov is Moov decided to start from scratch to build a net new payments processor, and in order to do that, we had to go find some crazy investors. So Matt Harris from Bain Capital, Angela Strange from Andreessen Horowitz, Dan Rosen from Commerce Ventures and Visa, and these investors really came from a top-down approach. They had invested into a lot of companies with brilliant ideas that were going to change the world, and then people spent all of their money kind of integrating into systems that were built before the Internet, so you know, a story that we can really resonate with.
And then I came from the same, you know, bottoms-up approach, really came at the problem from, as a builder, these are the things that I wish the world had so I could create net new experiences for end users. And it was fascinating to see, like, the top-down executive view from or top-down investor view, saying, "This is a problem that needs to be solved," and then me coming from the builder side and really meeting in the middle. And so, company's four years old. We've raised just over $85 million, which is probably not enough money to go solve this problem, but it really tells the story of the types of investors that came in and said, "Hey, don't hire salespeople. Don't do all these things.
Just go, you know, spend the first $45 million," before we made a dollar. You know, if you're not on Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Discover's website... Yeah, kind of doesn't matter what you're doing, you have to be that low-level processor in order to really move money in the United States. And so, you know, brought together an eclectic group of people that have experienced this pain, you know, both from an employee standpoint and a investor standpoint, and you know, out to change the world.
Yeah, that's fantastic. Any more color here, or am I too slow on the slide?
Oh, you're fine.
Okay.
So Moov is a network of networks payments processor. You know, our customer just wants to move money, get it? So, I came up with that on my own.
Nice slide. Yeah.
Yeah. So, but really what we were trying to do is, and Ben and I can share more about this later, is there's a lot of shortcuts when it comes to integration that have been done over the years. So, if you think about a memo in a core banking system that comes from a credit card being processed, it's really designed in the core banking system as a ledger entry that has enough information to print out on a statement. You know, that was the job to be done for that information. But when you run a payment, you actually know exactly where that point of sale was.
You know the name of the merchant, you know the address, you know all these different things that are part of the payments processing stack, but are different from the core banking stack. And so Moov's gone out and done direct connections into the, you know, four major card brands in the United States, The Clearing House , the Federal Reserve, and then we've built a real-time ledger on top of that to make it easy for our customers to move money and not have to worry about those low-level protocols. But we think, you know, the internet's gonna catch on. This AI thing may or may not happen. Those are jokes. But Ben laughed. But really built it in a way so that our customers can have access to that data.
A concrete example of that would be something that Ben just walked through when it comes to the DataBroker product. We've proven that we can get after a card swipe data into their DataBroker product, measured in milliseconds. So if transactional data is important for fraud, if it's important for financial institutions, just that one little piece is going to make a big difference for them.
Yeah. Huge. All right, let's set the table for the conversation. We're here to have about the state of small business, small business banking in particular, and the financial institutions who want to provide small banking services to small businesses. So I've put up here just a few of the anchor stats that kind of frame the conversation. One, from our 2024 benchmark survey of CEOs, growing deposits is the number one priority for 2024 and 2025. We know that small business deposits are usually four to five X in size what an average consumer deposit is.
And we have what I consider to be personally the biggest blind spot in the industry is almost every bank and credit union in the country, between 13% and 35% of their retail checking accounts are actually camouflaging micro and small business owners, the super majority of those being sole proprietors and gig workers, independent contractors, that kind of thing. So they're sitting there camouflaged in those retail checking accounts. Those retail checking accounts and the digital experience that comes with them don't give them what they need to do job one for a small business, which is to get paid to collect money. So what's been happening systematically for a number of years now is they go to these third-party apps like Square, like Intuit, like PayPal, et cetera, to collect those payments.
But the eye-opener is that only one out of every eight dollars they're collecting in those third-party settings ever makes its way back to the bank or credit union. Here squarely, where the number one priority is growing deposits. We also mentioned, I believe Greg mentioned this earlier, 78% of all of the CEOs who answered our Strategy Benchmark , both banks and credit unions, said they had plans to expand services to small businesses this year. We asked a follow-up question to those that said, "Yes, we're expanding services to small business." "Well, what services are you planning to expand?" And the number one response was payments. With that, I'd just like to open it up to you both. Wade, I'll start with you.
What's your take on where we are with small business in the United States? Where are the opportunities, where are the challenges, where's the pain?
Yeah, so I think another stat is that a small business account has 4.5x , 4.5x-5x the amount of money deposited as a retail deposit account.
Right.
So, so incremental wins for the bank in the SMB space, you know, has a much bigger impact on their balance sheet than growing the retail deposits. And what I think has happened up till now is what we're trying to solve, is that it's been a disjointed experience. So I come in, I open a checking account. In order to have access to the financial services world, you need a checking account, in order to get an Intuit, in order to get a Square. That's step number one. And so I have all this inertia going into a bank and I'm going to explain what my new business is going to do and all these great things, and preferably get a, you know, an operating line of credit. And then that inertia just stops.
Now I go back to my brick-and-mortar, you know, office, and I decide, "Oh, I need to do accounts receivable. How do I do that?" and so where we think we can help these financial institutions win is just keeping that inertia going, so as soon as we make, you know, account opening easier on the SMB side, now I have that account, I wanna flow into being able to accept payments and leverage, you know, other payment modalities to bring that money into the system and keep that inertia going, where most small businesses just wanna go do what they built the company to do.
Yeah. And Ben, just listening to him now, your language for that is law of least effort. It would be law of least effort to be able to open that checking account as a business-
That's right
... at the bank or credit union, and then just get what you need to start, s tart getting paid. Talk about the small business space, the number of, you know, new businesses being formed every year, the number of small businesses out there, that kind of thing.
Last few years, you can look at a number of different data points, roughly five to seven million new businesses a year. You know, there's a lot to say here. I wanna just, you know, talk about that one to eight collected, and then the real challenge we have to solve is that. Ron Shevlin, I think, said it best, where in which our banks and credit unions often become deposit motels, where things are just passing through, okay? So what we can see is that it's totally possible for us to kind of get them back to being the hub they used to be in a pre-internet time. Like Wade said, this internet thing's starting to catch on financial services. So there's that.
One of the big, like, amazing things that we get to do at Jack Henry, because of the way we do service and engagement with customers, I get to sit with with C-level operators, banks, credit unions, on the weekly. This is an on-the-ground, consistent conversation in every single meeting. I think they've. And I think there was some questioning around, like, is this new, like, based on like, you know, Fed funds rates and all this kind of stuff? It's not. They've always wanted to play in this space, I think. They always wanted to, they just didn't have the scale point ability to do it, and that requires technology build-out, but not just like technology build-out on the internet side. It requires rethinking how things actually work.
To put a finer point on it, he said it, and we're kind of dancing around it, but most small businesses end up with PayPal, Intuit, some version of PayPal, Intuit, Square, you know, and then they might open, you know, a JPMorgan Chase account all of a sudden because they can get a line of credit over here, they can get a card, or they can get a business line of credit and all those kinds of things, so they end up with this bifurcated experience. So we just think that we can solve it, you know, and bring them back into this, into this hub, and, you know, one more data point, a lot of people run LLCs on retail accounts. It's interesting. People might think, well, it's like a lot of micro business or... It's a lot of wealthy people.
I'm a good example. Wade is, too. We both have businesses that we ran and/or run. I have two LLCs. The places that I bank have no idea that I run them. I have no clue. My wife's frustrated 'cause it's on a retail account every time, every year we do tax and those kinds of things. But this is a common pattern. Oddly enough, even with some of our banking executives, they want this feature. It's really kind of funny. That's just a sort of a side note, but we think that this is just a huge opportunity that's sitting right in front of our customers, and really, we just have to go capture it.
Yeah. Speaking of LLCs, Wade-
Yeah
... that you own, I wanna-- Whoops, I'm actually trying to advance, and instead, I'm lasering people in the eye. Tell us about your business or two that you've got there on the side, and maybe give us a little more detail about-
Yeah
... sort of the practical SMB sort of experience at the moment.
Yeah, so the gentleman on the left is one of my business partners, Rick Moliterno. He owns and operates Standard Byke, which is, we build custom bikes for people in Davenport, Iowa. And, as we were building this product together, we really thought about what Rick's needs were, and Rick's needs are he wants to build bikes. So, if you notice in the photo, he's not in his office, doing accounts receivable and accounts payable. He's doing what he wants to do and doing what he loves, which is building custom bikes for people. And, that's my office on the right side. That's a gentleman that owns a plumbing business coming into my house and accepting... Oh, wow, he's keying in my Amex card, so that's great. I'm sure that's perfectly safe.
But and that box of computer parts is still there. But anyways.
You're busy.
Yeah. So this, this is really, you know, I call it, like, the perils of the small business. The small business just wants to run their business, and I feel like there's three things we can offer them, or three things that a small business wants to buy from us. You know, they'd love us to help them sell more things, which we maybe can't help them with that. They'd love for us to be able to give them their money faster. Oh, there's something we actually can do. So, by building a net new processor, it turns out when Walmart sells out of toilet paper in the morning, the card brands give them the money to reorder toilet paper in the afternoon. It's just, something that, you know, I guess the future's here, it's just not evenly distributed.
So Walmart is getting that money right away, but most small businesses are waiting almost a week from their merchant acquiring processor to get their money. And so if we can get their money faster, you know, even the same day that they run a transaction, and with things like PayCenter, Moov and RTP Center, all of our banks look at that. Wow, that was a Freudian slip. I was working together. That's a partnership. All of Jack Henry's banks have PayCenter, so they can receive that money almost instantaneously after settlement. So just getting that money back to them. Why? So that they can run their business. And then the third thing is saving them time. And so saving a small business time, you know, allows them to spend that time on actually servicing customers.
And so, by working with Ben on really integrating Moov into the Origin platform, we're making it super simple so that you have automatic reconciliation. 'Cause of Jack Henry's investments in open banking, all of that data has one-to-one reconciliation with the vast majority of small business accounting tools out there. And so we think if we can give those businesses their money, it's their money, give it to them as fast as possible. Side benefit, bank gets an overnight deposit. Give them reconciliation, which gives them time back. We're gonna allow them to get out into the market and do what they love, which is serving their customers.
Yeah. Ben, you talk all the time about, you know, you're taking the long view, you're looking at emerging technologies that are converging, what that means for the three, five, 10-year future. Things have changed and shifted in the small business space, specifically in the way they get paid. Can you talk a little bit about what those changes have been?
Yeah, so you know, sometimes what I always say when we talk about technology, sometimes you get a new starting line, or everybody has to go back to the starting line. People have been running a race for a few years, then all of a sudden everybody has to go back. That's happening, I think, in some cases in AI, in some domains. It's happening for small business because of Tap to Pa y. So the advent of Tap to Pay on these devices is a major sea change. So we fundamentally believe a few key things. One is that the app is now the point of sale. The app is the point of sale. And a quick intuition for this: how many of you all drank Starbucks today or sometimes drink Starbucks?
Just take a look at that point of sale. It's an Android phone in a dock, okay? So a lot of times you can see new technology riding the old until it becomes the new, all right? So that's a... So we see that that is a big sea change. We had some opportunities and some other things that we were looking at, and we just thought, you know, we really wanna bet big in this direction. So tap to pay is a big deal, needs to be on both platforms, iOS and Android. The app is the point of sale, and we think most businesses will be multi-acquired. So those are the core critical things that kinda came out of a discussion of Wade and I working on, like, okay, so what is the thing that we have to go solve for? Those are the sea changes.
Anything to add to that?
Yeah, I think two things. You know, financial institutions didn't like servicing point-of-sale.
Right.
And so that sea change of going to their personal device being the point of sale. Now no longer does a commercial loan officer need to go out and, you know, fix the printer at the point of sale on a Saturday. And so they've kinda stayed out of that business because they didn't have the support infrastructure possible in order to really help the small business. And now it's just not necessary for a lot of use cases. Second, you know, there are use cases, right, that you need cash drawer, you need all these type of things. But we see the need in the marketplace being multi-acquirer. And so I may have my point of sale up front, where I've got my conveyor belt, and I'm printing things off and taking cash, and I'm doing that in a restaurant.
But in the back office, how am I sending out that payment link in order to accept a payment, in order to do my catering business, in order to book a venue? Those probably flow through different merchant accounts, and so there's a lot of opportunity, even if in one area of their business, they maybe use something else, great. There's other areas of the business that we can help out with. And then a third thing that is actually kind of fascinating is, you know, iOS and Android actually have to have a native app with an SDK. And, you know, you've got 13 million people that have a native iOS and Android mobile banking app.
With what you've done with conversations, you've opened that up beyond, you know, just the controller. You've opened that up to the other people inside of the business, and now those other people inside of the business already have that app installed. They have the conversation piece installed, and now they can accept payments.
So a couple of quick things there. Just as a fun little side story anecdote is a phone call, my recollection of the phone call from Wade. I was in my sauna, finishing my day with some suffering, and he called me, and he's like: "Hey, do you know anybody that has-
I was still working, obviously, for the record.
He's like: "You know anybody who has a cool mobile app and has a digital platform and is building a new core?" You know, I'm like: "Yeah, I do. Let's keep talking." And so, but, like, on a more practical note, Jack Henry has. One of the things I always say about Jack Henry is we have a lot of the pieces and parts metaphorically to build nuclear weapons, meaning we have all the stuff because we're such a big, broad, diverse technology company. Thanks to, you know, a lot of shoulders that I get to stand on, folks like Dave and Greg and others that have built over time. So, for example, we have all this payments infrastructure that has been built that we're now harnessing.
So one of the important things as investors that you need to know is that this is gonna integrate seamlessly back through everything you've heard today for RTPs and possibly FedNow and others. So we're actually gonna build this system to work in our ecosystem, right? Which then creates all this other, what we might call drag, in terms of what everything else that we're doing. Banno has already built these user experiences for payments, right? And so, you know, as I kind of pondered this and we worked on it internally and kinda hammered through details, and there's a lot of innovation that we have done in the core to enable what you're about to see in these experiences that are just brand new, and they can't be unseen.
Once you see them, it's really hard to unsee it, 'cause they don't exist. And the reasons for that, I'm not gonna disclose from the stage exactly, but it's in everything that I went through in my presentation. But it's also an artifact of what Jack Henry can do. He mentioned Conversations. So Banno Conversations and Jack Henry Conversations, that platform, you gotta remember, what is our customer kind of trying to figure out how to do? They're trying to go figure out how to scale into SMB and then service those customers, right? And that's a different challenge for them than it is servicing a commercial customer, 'cause that's like a deep personal relationship, like it's a relationship service, and trust business is very boutique. Like, it's super. Like, our banks and credit unions kill on that front. They're great at that.
It's difficult for them to scale that human capital model into SMBs, you follow? Like, so we were like, "Well, we already have this conversational platform." We actually built, it's done. We built an SMB version of this for Conversations. We haven't rolled it out yet, because we wanna get this all right in terms of what you'll see in a minute, but effectively, we're gonna allow the banks to quickly and easily service these customers, so we can scale that service point, that service, relationships, and trust point with using tools like AI Assist and other things. Also, I'm a small business, I need to add my accountant, right? We wanna make that stupid easy. We're doing that in Banno Business with our Conversations platform, right? So as we've been scaling Banno Business through that spectrum that you saw on Shanon's slide, right?
Now, it's like, okay, so how do we go solve this SMB problem?
Yeah. So let's talk about it. What are you building?
Yeah. So I think one of the things that we had decided in 2010 was the most important feature for digital banking was getting your balance as fast as possible. That was, like, the hill we were willing to die on, was get balance back, get balance to the phone as fast as possible. And how fast is-
300 milliseconds.
300 milliseconds to your-
That's a phone to API. Phone is dependent on, like, the Grand Hyatt internet connection, right?
Yeah.
But, like, back to API, this is a KPI we've actually measured for 14 years. We still measure it today. I get a weekly report on that KPI, and Chuck was asking me a good question on the side, like, "Why does that start to matter, like, real-time connectivity and all that?" Really, we think some of that's only possible in the Jack Henry ecosystem if we have control over these core systems and all the intermediary layers.
Mm.
Right?
Yeah.
So.
Yeah, so I think speed's the best user experience.
Yeah.
and so we're gonna show what enrolling, approving a merchant account application, accepting a payment, and utilizing a mobile phone to send it to somebody who's not physically there takes, and I think we have ninety seconds. So-
Yeah, let's.
I watch.
Let's show and feel free to call or comment what they're-
Yeah, so this is-
What they're gonna see here.
I wanna enroll into a merchant account. I already know your business from my CIF record. I can underwrite you pretty easily, and you're ready to go. The MID's generated, if there's any nerds in the room, one board member. Accept $50, Tap to Pay. SDK is embedded into the Banno app already. And if you wanna send it to somebody remotely, we don't need, like, a huge servicing center. We just create a payment link. And actually, what is a mobile phone really good at? Communicating. Send a text message.
Turns out it's still called a phone.
Yeah, and send it to them. And then, as soon as those payments are accepted, the money automatically reconciles into your checking account. Turns out, lots of small businesses, they do this thing called cash flow. It's different than GAAP, and they run everything off of that. And so their transactional history is really, really important to know exactly what's coming in inside of there. And then, the mobile app is the point of sale. So if you wanna do a refund, a modification of the auth, anything, since Origin has a new data model for types of transactions, we just embedded a Moov type into that, so you can modify the entire transaction inside of your digital banking experience.
Just getting started, lots more features to add, but the kind of common thread between Ben and I is, you know, start at that first principle, start at the foundation, and keep on building with our customers and allowing them to expand as our feature set expands.
So one of the things that is difficult, and he was referring to this with Rick, his partner in the bike company, is he spends an insane amount of hours reconciling, and actually, Wade sometimes will jump in and help him, reconciling transactions back through to his accounting software.
QuickBooks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Turns out there's a lot of QuickBooks users in the world. And what we wanna do as a platform, like from a Jack Henry perspective, we're saying, hey, we wanna be agnostic to what the consumer wants to do and what the bank's customer or the credit union's customer or member wants to do. So then how do we enable continuous accounting? Well, the answer is in open banking.... So this is why open banking starts to matter. So, we can actually affect that. Now, I'm gonna skip a few secrets that we have, okay, about how we did some of the underlying plumbing, but we can actually display the transactions coming off of the acquiring system that Wade has built. We can display those in-app, and you can just see them. Like, this seems obvious, does it not?
Like, why do you have to go to another system to try to get them and then try to reconcile them manually? This is like one of the biggest pain points in the SMB space, period. Well, if you're building a new system, and some of you who are real smart. I know some of y'all are real smart, like, you come talk to me afterwards. I know. You ask smart questions later. You'll probably be able to figure out some of what we're doing here, but it's pretty special because, like, what we're doing is we don't think, like, exactly naturally or quickly possible for other people to do. If that makes sense.
So, I wanna. Tell me if I get this right 'cause it, we got serious brainpower here on the stage. If you go back 10, 20 years, you're a business, and you wanna set up a merchant account. You're looking at a 1-2-week process that may require an in-person visit at a bank to get and then provide the paperwork and other stuff needed to get the underwriting to establish the merchant account, et cetera. And then you get into the, you know, era of Square and the PayPal, that kind of, you know, they take care of a master merchant account, and then using subaccounts from that, they're able to trim that 1-2 weeks' worth of paying down to maybe 2-4 days-
Yep
... if I understand it right. So what we're looking at here is the fact that, because of the integration direct to the core, the ability to tap to enroll, have the underwriting performed, automated, approved, and then you just begin accepting transactions. That's a big, big deal, is it not? I mean, am I putting that into the right context?
Yeah. If you can come to my next board meeting, I'd appreciate it, Lee.
Okay.
But yeah, I think fundamentally, you are dealing with a net new processor, right? So, you know, I hope someday I'm called a legacy processor. That means you won for a heck of a long time period of time. But you think about somebody like First Data, a divestiture from Amex in 1958 , in order to do card acquiring. Like, there's just a lot of systems that are outside of payment processing that were built over time. You know, what we're doing here is a net new processor, a net new cloud-native processor. So, you know, there's no dependency on anything other than the card brands in order to card brands, Moov and Jack Henry in order to pull this off.
And so being able to streamline that entire workflow, from start to finish with modern tools is pretty exciting. And the other piece is in merchant acquiring, there's been a lot of dependency on, like, previous statements, right? You know, "Send me your PDF of your previous statements." In partnership with Jack Henry, we have, you know, previous bank account statements.
Mm.
So you don't fundamentally need to upload these things. You don't need to go double-check how many NSFs, what's my average daily balance? Like, Ben's got that data pretty readily available, and then as a chartered financial institution, you go through a CIP program. So we know that this user is a U.S. citizen. We know they're an actual business. We know all of these things just because the financial institution already took on that burden in order to bring them into the financial services world. But then they end up being a host to somebody else in order to make the processing volume. And so we're just trying to bring those things together and really streamline that process, and the faster we can do that, that was my comment about the inertia. Like, you've already opened this bank account, you know-
There's KYC, KYB-
... how much more work is it to just say-
All the data's there.
... "Accept a payment?
Right.
Yep.
Yeah, and so the inertia, the law of least effort, I mean, it doesn't get less effort than-
Yeah, hopefully, it's a-
... a single tap to begin.
If you see it and you say, "Well, why wouldn't everyone do that?" Yeah, well, that's our goal. That's the point.
Yeah.
Hopefully, we make it really easy for businesses to go back to running their business.
That solves against the backdrop of 33 million small businesses. 80% of them are sole proprietors. A lot of them camped out and hidden and camouflaged inside of all the banks and credit unions that Jack Henry serves. It's pretty mind-blowing to think about.
Yeah
... the scope and scale-
Yep
... of what's possible. So, Ben, you started to color this a little bit, but I know you don't want to give away the secret sauce, but speak a little bit more about how this is possible. How, you know, what made this possible-
Yeah
... to achieve?
I mean, basically, what happened is Wade and I got old, and, you know, we're just like the old crotchety guys now. Like, we just know how stuff works. Like, you're gonna be in a tough conversation with me if you want to talk core processing and payments because I know how the stuff works now. I've been inside Jack Henry for ten years. Wade went and took on payments big time, all the way, all the way to the network, right? So nothing in between. Lots of people build payments companies with lots of stuff in between. I call them Big Mac companies. Lots of stuff in there. What is it? All kind of stuff. So our goal is to go back to the metal, right, and I have a presentation I've done. You can find it on the Internet. It's super boring.
You'll need, like, wine or whatever, but it's called Down the Stack. Wade wanted me to give that presentation at his conference because and I was like: Dude, this is too boring for your conference. Like, it's down the stack. It's so boring. But way down the stack here, if you look, I'm just sort of representing this, like, okay, so you have VisaNet and the card networks, and you have this integration. There's a lot of stuff in between it, and we're, we happen to be reworking that. So Wade mentioned the memo field that's in every transaction. How many of you, sometime in the last year, looked at a transaction in your mobile bank, in your online bank, and you're like: I don't know what this is, and you ask your partner, or you ask yourself: What in the worl is this thing? How many of you?
Okay, that only exists because these things were built before the internet. How many companies have been funded to go solve a categorization problem of transactions?
Yeah.
Like-
It turns out-
Oh, my!
... Visa and Mastercard and Amex don't allow you to run a transaction if they don't know who you are. It's crazy, right?
Kinda weird.
Kinda weird.
Right, so-
Why don't you know?
So, like, this goes back to the question this gentleman was asking earlier about, like, you know, identity. So I was explaining to Wade, like: Hey, we have an identity platform. We know the identity. The bank knows the identity. Like, we have it. It's stored, like, by regulatory, like, we have to, right? Okay, so then, if you kinda run all this all the way through, we're rebuilding our card management and card middleware systems right now, and we're designing it for the new world, and we're not gonna have, for example, memo fields like you know them today. We're gonna have structured data underneath, and all of a sudden, it doesn't require AI to search your transactions, although you might do that, but no AI required. It's a T-shirt I wanna wear at Jack Henry, "No AI required.
You have a lot of T-shirts.
Wow!
Yeah, yeah, just like, you know, it's like sort. You can sort them and then look at them. So anyway, but yeah, like, I think the message here is to understand, like, there's been a lot of questions like: Why would you make this investment? Why would you do tech mod? It's enabling new products that enables our customers to go compete and punch above way, way, way above their weight. And in the weeds, there's all this technical stuff that me and Wade will kinda work through, and our teams are very privy to. But this kinda gives you... This is the last most important thing. This is an SDK or what we're calling Jack Henry Kits. This is super important to understand. This will not just be a Banno option, okay?
It'll be first in Banno, so our Banno customers are gonna get it first, probably best on Banno in the Jack Henry ecosystem, but it will also be enabled to be used in other platforms. Right, so that should perk your interest. This is an SDK, and this gets us into, like, "Ben, is this core? Is this digital?" It's like, this is a product that can be offered outside of Banno. It's not a Banno thing, but it happens to be built inside Banno first. So what you saw on that screen is just how it looks in Banno. It might look like something different. Say, if we have, like, for example, we have big credit unions that run, like, other platforms that they built themselves, they could then literally use this, like, you know, just out of the box.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Like an ACH transfer.
Yeah. Yeah.
No digital.
Really exciting.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean-
So that's what I'm excited about is I went and built this little thing on the side, and to be able to partner with Jack Henry and all their technology investments, it's one of those exciting opportunities where one on one equals ten. So I don't think we could bring this to market without Jack Henry, so I appreciate the partnership and excited to build with you all.
Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, we have four minutes. I know we've got a little bit of leeway still, Vance, so we're gonna open it up for questions. I know these guys would be happy to field any questions you have.
I'd be interested in how you envision this product being priced. Do you anticipate that the banks will pay for it because they want SMB customers, and they'll absorb all the cost, or do you think this becomes more of a profit center for FI, and they charge for the product?
Yeah, I think the SMB market has plenty of margin in it, it as far as comps. So if you take a Square or an Intuit as a pricing model, typically they have two pricing models, blended rate or flat rate, it's sometimes called. So you'll see, you know, $0.29 and $0.30 , but they don't charge for chargebacks, or they don't charge for PCI or different things like that. So that's kind of the flat rate model. And then people that are at real volumes, you know, usually do some form of cost-plus model. And so we see it as an opportunity to go to market in a more self-service way without analyzing statements in the flat rate model, and then over time, we can promote them into a more cost-effective model.
And then, you know, we don't see this as a cost center to the financial institution. They're going to benefit from getting the deposits, having a more loyal customer, right there,
Very sticky anchoring experience.
Yep.
Leads to all kind of other opportunities for the financial institution. Then to answer your question about, you know, I can't, like, say exactly directly, but I think there's bundling opportunities for Jack Henry with our customers that they've told us directly they're super interested in. As an example, I mentioned it earlier, but Finicity will be a part of this rollout. So yes, for retail, that's super cool. I can add my B of A account. But if you're a small business, you have multiple relationships, period. Right? So, Finicity will be a big part of this early-stage rollout as well. Like, so we're bringing our existing partnerships to bear. This becomes a really powerful bundle for our customers. And they've indicated they're definitely, you know, there's some interest in, like, how that works, you know.
The big key for us to crack is can we scale it into their financial institution via the app, right? The app. If the app is the delivery channel, and then Greg was talking about the card networks, like working on some marketing dollars and helping them go to market, but you can think of these folks as effectively. They're not being serviced for edge payments in a lot of ways, and then we're bringing other things to bear, so the short answer to your question is yeah, more like detail to be determined.
One thing I'll add, Kartik, is, and they referenced Banno, but there's other products we have at Jack Henry that were built for small businesses that were sold as point-to-point solutions and not sold as an aggregate solution. So part of what we're gonna do is we're gonna be able to take some of those point-to-point solutions and bring that into a full bundle. So there's different assets that we already have today that could be utilized as part of this offer.
Like Business Bill Pay is a great example.
Yeah.
Business RDC is a great example. We have large bases of customers, we have you know, we already have user experiences in our apps for those things. We mentioned Conversations, so yes, there's gonna be a whole bundling strategy coming to bear. We're just not ready to talk about it quite yet.
Any other questions? No. Are we good? Wade, Ben, thank you. This is terribly exciting. Please give them a round of applause, and we are now going to bring up our Chief Sales Officer, Mr. Brian Otte. Brian.
That was a short intro. Since we paid for this podium, I decided to actually use it since no one else wanted it. But as the three gentlemen were talking just now, something occurred to me. So I met Ben. Ben, I met you about 12 years ago, and I actually met you through Wade Arnold. And, but probably some of the folks in this room, and I'll get to why I'm mentioning this, I don't know, is I actually met Wade. Wade, I think I met you about 22 years ago. So we were both in our, not to date ourselves, but in our 20s. Both part founders of two separate companies. We ended up partnering with each other, and back then, I couldn't get two words out of Wade, so he's changed quite a bit in the past 20-some-odd years.
But that opportunity came because I got to work in this industry, which I'm pretty passionate about. I left it for a very brief period. I didn't leave the banking space, but I left the world of community FIs in the U.S., and I missed it. But along the way, I got to meet some special people, and one of the benefits I had was, with that company that I was a founder of, was partnering with a number of companies. And I think that's a pretty cool aspect, that I had, a pretty interesting lens, 'cause I worked with just about everyone that was servicing banks and credit unions. Through that, I met a gentleman named Dave Foss, who's sitting right here right now, and I got to serve on a board with him.
And when I made a decision of coming back to this space, I had the luxury of taking a look at the insights of a number of companies. And at that point, there was no question where I wanted to go back, what was my landing spot. And so it was pretty easy for me to decide, for a number of reasons, why I wanted Jack Henry to be my home. And so 12 years later, I think I made a great decision for myself and I tell you this, I get asked all the time this question: What is it about us that's different? You know, what makes us special here? And it's interesting.
Executives from other companies that compete with us hate when I say this, but it's funny to watch some of the sales execs, their ears perk up when I say this as well. It's fun to win because of the company that you're with, not in spite of the company that you're with. I don't know if that resonates with some of you, but I can tell you this: when I say that, some of the individual contributors, you see their heads go down, and then I see the nods from some of the executives. I think that's earned every single day here at this company, and I'll get into some of the details why.
One of the fun parts of my job every year, we just started our new fiscal year, is I get to choose the theme of what we're following up. You know, historically, I've heard words like Ignite, Unite, whatever inspirational word, and that's fine. A couple of years ago, I thought to myself, I've been in the trenches, looked up, and I wanted the theme to actually mean something to what we were doing. Relevant, not just some word that we would try to rally around, and get inspired by. Two years ago, when One Jack Henry was an initiative, and I'll get into that point here in a moment, I stole a theme from my two daughters are in college now.
They went to an all-girls school, and the theme of that school is, "To be rather than to seem." When I heard that, I knew immediately I wanted my girls to go to that school, and they became powerful women, really inspired me. Bottom line, to be rather than to seem, walk the walk. So if we're gonna be One Jack Henry, you know, when we started FY 2023, that was our theme. And as I went into this year, and actually I decided about this a year ago, I noticed that there was a little bit of nervousness, a lot of change happening, and that's exciting. But you all know what that means when change happens, and there gets some nervousness. And at one point, people are saying, "Oh, people don't like change," but at Jack Henry was a little bit different.
I think the nerves came from, we've done things well. We've succeeded for quite some time, and so I think many of you know that, so when you start making changes, the fear is, are we gonna lose who we are? and the answer is no. I mean, at the end of the day, we're gonna, and I hope you guys have heard that throughout a number of the sessions, we're gonna continue to honor our past, but with that, we wanna make sure that we're embracing our future, so pretty proud of that theme, and I think as we go along through this year, it's something that's hitting home with a lot of us, we don't wanna lose who we are, and we've seen some other companies and industry lose that along the way.
If you wanna know our secret sauce, it's that, and you're gonna hear that over and over and over again. The word starts with C. I don't even have to say it. You guys have heard it throughout the years, and you've heard it throughout today as well. So I'm just gonna hit you between the eyes. This doesn't define our sales team, but I know this is a stat you all wanna see right off the bat. So our winning is accelerating. This is not our whole story for the year, but core wins obviously bring a lot of drag, a lot of other business along with it. So if you take a look at our bump up from one year over the next, over a 20% increase in what we closed year over year. Now, Greg alluded to this before.
We could get the numbers, but what are the quality of the wins? And something that we've been charged with, and we heard loud and clear, is that we're gonna continue to go upstream. How did we do there? We bumped up by 200%. So going from $5 billion to $15 billion+ core wins, I think was something that was not done by accident. It was intentional, we focused. And the other thing that's pretty interesting if you take a look at it, we now, our average sale for a financial institution for this past year crossed over $1 billion, the assets that they had. So that was an interesting stat for us.
So when we get some narratives, and we love hearing the false narratives about us, some of them just aren't true, and I'll touch on those here in a moment. So one of the questions I get quite a bit is, you know, why are we winning? And I'll start with a couple of factors here. First and foremost, and I think this is something pretty special here, yes, we have a sales organization, we have a marketing organization, but we win as a company. We don't live on an island in sales. We don't live on an island within marketing. And when I say that, legal's involved, operations involved, finance is involved. They're all involved in the sales process.
As I take a look around and I see a number of our executives, they actually go out there and sell with us. That's pretty special 'cause I haven't seen that in some other places that I've been a part of. With that, we're held accountable. All right, so what does that mean? And Greg still holds up to this, but when I took this position, and I'm going now in my third year, Dave made it very clear: "You're gonna be held accountable. The standards are high," and they dug in. What does that mean? I've never seen a CEO dig into the pipeline, and they do that each and every month, and I think that's something pretty special that we have over here. So yeah, the standards are high, we're held accountable, but everyone's involved along the way.
There's never a time where I feel like we're left alone. We know we have a strong force behind us, and I think that that's helped us quite a bit. So the other one, other aspect I wanna touch on, and obviously, the hard work is there, the hours are there, we all get that, but company unification. And I think, you know, for years, we've worked well as a company, but we have seen the benefit, and I'll talk about the branding here in a moment. But I think one of the key things is we've eliminated confusion along with the marketplace, and we're working together. And so when I meet with my team, one of the things that we talk about is we lead by involvement.
We don't lead by consensus, and that may seem obvious to everyone, but the key thing here is that the right hand is talking to our left hand, and I think we've seen a lot of benefits from that over the past couple of years, delivering innovation so I'm gonna take a step back here. One of the key things that we wanna go to market with, and I knew that about Jack Henry, is that we do things the right way. You keep hearing, you know, do the right thing. But even when we go to market, we do not throw mud at someone else. That's just not our style. Now, along the way, what's interesting is we hear a lot of narratives about us. We feel strongly that it's our right to defend ourselves and to help course-correct what that narrative is.
But even innovation, I love to hear when people start talking about, "Well, is Jack Henry innovative or not?" You've all seen what's going on right now, and one of the key words is we can talk about concepts and ideas, but we're executing along the way, and the market is seeing that. So I think beyond our history, and we do have a history of delivering, we do have a history of doing what we say, and I think that's really important. So when I talk about win because of the company you're with, that's one huge benefit that we have. I've got roughly close to 50 years of the reputation that this company has built, that we get to lean on. So it's, I think the key thing here is it's not lip service. When we state something, we deliver on it.
I'll give you an example. When we do our contract processing and we go through negotiations, one of the complaints that we get sometimes is, "Hey, you guys are meticulous with the contracts," etc., "maybe take a little more time than some others." The reason being is because when we make a promise, we're gonna commit to it. We just don't randomly throw out things that we're gonna do, and we think that that reputation that we build is critical to the success of our future. Build and nurture the pipeline. This is something that I've worked closely with our marketing leader, Jeff VanDeVelde. Yeah, branding is important, but along the way, we wanna make sure that we're opening that funnel and that we're nurturing that pipeline along the way, and that we're doing it consistently across the board.
So let's take a look at it. So I can talk about concepts here, but let's talk about new standards. So we obviously had 57 new core wins, but how does that translate to the rest of the sales progress and what we've seen? So FY 2023, a year ago, we had a great year. Our sales attainment was a record number for us, and we came off a Q4 that quite frankly, as a quarter, was a record quarter, we weren't sure if we were gonna be able to replicate. We thought we felt confident we'd be able to beat the year, and set a new standard for the year, but that quarter was something that was very interesting to us. So what did we accomplish this past year? I think quite a bit. Q1, we had a strong Q1.
We didn't set a record Q1 quarter, but then again, we came off of a record quarter, so we had drained the pipeline a little bit, but it remained healthy. I'll touch on the pipeline and what that means to us here in a moment. But right after that, we set a new record Q2, and when we did that, in turn, we set a record for sales attainment for the first half of the year. Later on, a record Q3, and then just to give you an idea of how we did, I could talk about record Q4, but as compared to the previous year, 20% higher, compared to the Q4 of FY 2023. So substantially higher. Altogether, the way I look at it is this unification process is working.
We're working hand in hand with one another, but I also think that the unification process is making sure that we're not tackling something in a splintered fashion, and that's near and dear to our heart. From a management style, I get asked, you know, "What's near... You know, what's important to me?" I take a look at a number of metrics, but we manage to the month. I don't necessarily wanna just focus on the quarter. I want that month. By definition, we make the month, we make the quarter. We make the quarter, we make the half. We make the half, we make the year. And I want to continue to have that sense of urgency with the team.
I don't wanna get to this mode of, "Let's just focus on the quarter." Those months matter, and again, as stated before, we're held accountable to that as well. All right, so what are our priorities here as a team? First and foremost, it's to beat our plan, and now with that, obviously, we're gonna have to have a discipline, and we have forecasting accuracy. I, I start mentioning some of the things, but one of the key things that we've done together as a group is created standards. Before I took this role, we take a look at the team, and we still have specialists, but there were different ways on the way sales organizations were working, and, and we've centered that. I'll touch a little bit more about our unification process here in a moment. Protect our house.
So obviously, we don't want business leaving out the back door, and this is where I talk about the company effort as a whole. Our renewal process, I get asked sometimes, "When does that start?" It starts day one, whenever we get that client on board. And we're not reaching out all of a sudden when it's a year before renewal time. We are in continuous communication with our clients, and it's not just about the renewal, it's about their experiences. It's about making sure that they feel that they have a true partnership with us, and I think that's a critical part of our sales process. Embracing One Jack Henry.
All right, so this is something a couple of years ago, I got asked the question, I went to Greg and I said, "All right, Greg, you know, I've been through this rodeo with a couple of other companies. What's different about One Jack Henry? So, you know, we can talk about unifying, but what's gonna make this different where it actually works?" And his statement to me, which I thought was pretty powerful, he said, "If anyone thinks we're dipping our toe in the pool on this one, we are gonna remind them each and every day that One Jack Henry isn't going anywhere." And we still see that to this day. I mean, you guys have seen that, I think, a year ago.
You've seen the repeated theme right now, and it's something that every organization within the company holds themself to dearly with. All right, increasing our wallet share. One of the things that we're doing together, and we've done territory analysis in the past, but we're doing a lot more of this as a team, meaning all the sales organizations are working together to do white space analysis, so that we can understand where are the areas of opportunity and what makes sense for our clients that we currently have to see if there's areas where they can make investments that can help them along the way. New customer acquisition, so obviously, you know, it's not just the core wins that are important to us.
There's business along the way that we do that it's outside of the core, and we're analyzing that routinely. But alongside that, we also understand that there are consultants out there that work with our banks and our credit unions, and I think for the past number of years, we've made that a focus, a focal point for us, where we have relationships with these key consultants. We're making sure that they know that we're there, that we have a number of solutions that can help out their clients and capabilities that can help out their clients as well. And then finally, gain efficiencies.
You know, that's something that we're focused on routinely, and it's something that, you know, from my seat, I'm trying to make sure that two things, we're working smarter and, we're working consistently, so that we don't have multiple approaches in the way that we're tackling our sales, processes. All right, sales unification. So from this standpoint, we took a look at our whole sales team, a couple of years back, and from that, one of the key things that we took a look at was the, sales operations background. We had a number of different groups that were working independently with our sales groups, and, a couple of years back, we brought that together. For us, that was the foundation, and that's where we've seen a lot of efficiencies.
The way we put proposals out, our contracts out, responding to RFPs, it's consistent now. Our go-to-market strategy now is unified. Again, we'll touch on branding here in a moment. Education, you notice I'm not talking about sales training. It's true education. We wanna make sure that our sales professionals are understanding what's going on in the industry, understanding the values of the solutions we're bringing to the table, and that we can have meaningful conversations when we go to the table. Ultimately, that will ideally give us the right to talk about our solutions if we're giving them value every time we go to a meeting. Territory planning, that's not going anywhere. In fact, we're doubling down on that to make sure that we understand clearly, you know, what's out there, what are the areas of opportunities for growth, and continue to work as teams.
And, finally, we wanna be consistent in the way that we measure from the pipelines, forecasting, everything across the board. And ultimately, the way we look at it, and you've heard this theme over and over again, is that if we're consistent, if we're unified, then ideally, when you're doing business with us from a contracting negotiation standpoint, we're making it easier to do business with us as well. All right, so a couple years back, we decided to make a pretty big initiative for us, which was a branding change. And for us, it was exciting, but that didn't come without some questions along the way. You know, you guys have heard the name ProfitStars over the year. You heard Symitar, it's now the name of our core.
But ultimately, this was probably one of the best moves I think that we've made as a company. A, is allowing us to invest in one brand. B, it's taken away this splintered view, right? All of a sudden, when you talk to us, it's Jack Henry. At the end of the day, everyone works for Jack Henry, and that's who our customers are working with, and we see it in a number of things, not just in our marketing collateral, not just in our conversations that we're having, but even in our events. So this is not an AI-generated picture. This is actually a visual from our annual event called Connect. And we saw it even there.
So a couple years back, we held our first Connect conference in San Diego, and one of the things that we did, which was a big change, is, and you would have thought that we were revolutionizing the world by doing this. We decided, "Hey, we're gonna bring in the credit unions and the banks, and we're actually gonna have them in the same space, and they're gonna actually be able to talk to one another." And there was a lot of debate over that, and it ended up being a very strong move for us. San Diego, which was two years ago, was an absolute success. We crossed over a certain number, which was a record number for us. But then the question we had for ourselves was a couple things. Was this pent-up demand because of COVID?
We saw that, right? Certain events started picking up right afterwards. Did people want to go to San Diego? You know, beautiful location, we get that. Did people want to see what Connect would be like, and that they were there for the first one? The next year, our numbers increased by over 10% in attendance, and then our booths sold out, and I'll get to in a moment why I think that's kind of important, but the next event was in Indianapolis, and I love Indianapolis, not knocking it, but all of a sudden now we're in the center of the country. We're not on the ocean. It's clearly a year later, so that pent-up demand has evaporated, and our numbers went up.
Our numbers went up on the registrants that were there, and our numbers went up on the exhibitors. In fact, we sold out with the exhibitors that we had to add more space and go back to the convention center and say, "Can we add another twenty?" "Yes, we sold out immediately." "Can we add another thirty?" And finally, they had no more capacity. This year, it's gonna be in Arizona. We're already sold out with the exhibitors, and we're at a clip that we're probably gonna set a new record there. Why does that matter? Because ultimately here, I think one of the key things that we're doing is we're educating. So we're not throwing an event where it, you know, we're just there to have a good time and smile and, you know, buy them drinks and dinner.
My feeling is that everyone has options on where they wanna be, and if they're not educated, if they don't feel like there's value with their time, they're not gonna come back. So I think that clip of the attendance going up shows the value that we're bringing to the table. But even what's interesting to me is the exhibitors going there. They're investing their money, and some of them, a lot of them compete with us. And in many cases, they come back to us and say, "This is probably one of the best shows that we can go to." Why? Because of the engagement. But again, I'll go back to that vision that we had a couple years back, which was a very big strategic move that I think is...
I don't think it's a coincidence that we're seeing our sales attainment going up year over year now and over the past couple of years at a very healthy clip. Look, I'd love to take some credit along the way, but this is a movement that we have here. It's built up from years and years and years of delivering on what we say we're gonna deliver, and it's now coming together with this unification that I'm pretty proud of as a company that we're continuing to focus on. All right, some sales highlights. I mentioned the 57 core wins, so let's break it down by banking versus credit union. Banking, we had 37, which was a strong number for us. And then credit union, we had 20.
One of the things I do wanna mention here is we did add two de novo, so we removed that. We're at 55 institutions that, by definition, means we displaced from a competitor. I mean, think about that for a second. That means that they had a transition. They're gonna have to think about migrating, which isn't an easy task to do in many cases, right? I mean, I get asked the question, "Who's your bigger, biggest competitor?" The incumbent. Just staying where you're at, that's probably the toughest thing that we have to deal with because we're gonna have to explain why change matters and why it makes sense for them. So really proud of the numbers that we saw there. Obviously, on the Banno Digital Platform, we're continuing to see momentum there, close to 200 there.
And on the complementary side, we're still seeing some really high numbers there, close to a thousand solutions sold or new footprints sold outside of the core base. All right, sales focus. So one of the key things that I routinely wanna talk about with the team is speaking the same language. And with that, that means that the way that we manage is similar. So from my point of view, imagine if you have, you know, pilots working in different planes. Ideally, if we have the cockpit looking the same, I can take one of my managers, move them over to another team, and although the solutions may be different, the way that they manage is gonna be very similar. So we wanna make sure that we're consistent across the board, gauging everything along the way.
I mentioned about casting a wide net for the pipeline, nurturing those leads along the way. We're very focused on that as well, and then also understanding our customer pain point, pain points. So one of the key things that we wanna do is put ourselves in the shoes of the buyer. One of the things that we're analyzing right now is understanding that they have a lot of information that's coming at them at once, right? Typically, when we go to them, they've already done a lot of research on our solutions, but one of our key things that we need to do as a sales organization now is helping them understand about all this data that they're gathering.
So just think about it as making sense of the data that they have and ideally helping them make a decision that ultimately gives them confidence and that later on, they don't have a regret on it. And we wanna make sure that when someone joins the Jack Henry family, that they feel strong about that decision. Continue to educate and team collateral, and then also, we wanna continuously have this mindset of improvement, right? Learning from one another each and every day, that's a focus of our team. All right, pipeline. So this is back of the envelope. The pipeline analysis that we do goes a lot deeper. We go by group, by product, etc., but I'll give it to you at a high level.
When we take a look at it for the year, when we start, we wanna be around 85%, so that we have proper quota coverage. Last year, as Greg mentioned about our pipeline, at the end of FY 2023, so going into FY 2024, we had 105%. So even though we had a strong Q4, we replenished quite a bit on that pipeline. That was really important to us, making sure that we didn't take our foot off the pedal there. Yes, we were executing on closing contracts, but we wanted to make sure that we were replenishing that as well. So now the question is, all right, Brian, can you guys continue to deliver at that clip? Strong year, you guys have already heard about those record numbers.
As we went into Q4, and I'll leave it right here, 120% of our target. And so we did a pretty good job on executing on that in Q4. And I can tell you right now, we have not lost our focus on replenishing that pipeline. It's still there. We do a very good job on converting on it, so I'm liking the numbers that I'm seeing. Obviously, we're pretty thrilled about the year that we had from a sales attainment process, but we're gonna continue with this model of making sure that we have proper quota coverage, not just from each sales organization, but for the products that we care about as well.
Sizable market, so this is something that we're analyzing, breaking down the market that we're serving, and which institutions that we're zeroed in on. Obviously, the billion-dollar plus space is important to us altogether, and so this is something that we're continuing to analyze. In the credit union market, you can see that we have our fair share. But one thing I do wanna point out is when we get some stones thrown at us about the fact that, you know, what size institutions we can support. I think the numbers speak for themselves, but we're zeroed in. We're gonna continue to gain market share there, and it's something that I know Greg's on top of me about that routinely, and it's something as a team that we're continuing to focus on.
So ultimately, when we have conversations, what does the market tend to care about? And I get this all the time. Does our tech modernization story matter? It's not the only reason that they buy, but I could tell you this: they know that they're partnering with a company that has that history, but has that innovation coming along the way. And so when we bring Ben to the table, when we bring Greg to the table, Shan to the table, the list goes on, they know that we're investing into our future and by definition, their future as well. Financial crimes, and risk and our fraud solutions, that's something that the market cares about. We're zeroed in on that. We've talked about that before, but that also helps us within our sales cycle as well.
Obviously, digital is a key focal point for us during our discussions, payments, and, you know, we just touched on about the SMB solutions and where we're going there. One of the things I do wanna mention, though, when we talk about last year, and I probably should have put something alluding to this, is we could talk about a record sales attainment year, and then we could talk about record quarters, but what I would be concerned about from my seat is, was there one hero that pulled us along the way, so the payments pull us there. Just so you all know, with each one of those quarters, every group was making their number, and for the year, payments, credit union, banking, complementary, across the board, digital, all of the groups hit the numbers that we set for them.
So it wasn't one group taking us to the finish line, and we can celebrate while the others are struggling. It was a group effort along the way, and ultimately, I think that that unification process has been key. So I'll end it with this, is that we're not gonna change who we are as a company, our culture, it's near and dear to our heart. Look, we can talk about differentiation. You know, someone can come at us and, and reduce their pricing. They can add a, a feature, but I don't think culture is something that you can change overnight. So I don't, I don't take that differentiation lightly. I think it's something that we need to continue to double down on, know who we are, and I think the market understands that.
Everyone can talk about wanting to serve this market, but I'll tell you this, I think the actions speak for themselves. We haven't lost track on who we wanna serve. You've not seen us deviate from that, and the market hasn't seen us shift. So I kind of think it's cute when people say, "I'm focused on this market, but this year may not be. Next year, I will be. I'll figure it out three years from now." We're not going anywhere. We, you know, and so if people wanna wonder where we're zeroed in on, it's the community, FI space. We're gonna continue to go down that route. And I think that gives a lot of assurances when someone signs a long-term contract with Jack Henry, that not only do we wanna partner with them, but we're gonna partner with them for the long term.
With that, I'll end it. Hopefully, I didn't need too much time there and see if there's any questions. I know there's also questions for the general group, if you guys have that as well. Looks like I'm standing between you and some drinks. Okay, I don't know if there's general questions for anyone else as well.
We can open it up to general questions for any of the presenters at this point, if there's questions for Brian or anybody else. James?
Thank you very much. I appreciate all the details on kind of how you're targeting for sales. I wanna go back a little bit to the technology and Banno and what presentation that Ben gave. Can you talk a little bit about how we should think about the growth of Banno, and then how that contributes to the overall growth targets that have been set out over the medium term? And it seems like it's something that should ramp and compound and become an increasing proportion of that sales figure overall. But just trying to think through, like, how that moves the needle, if at all, from a long-term growth perspective and how do we get there? Thanks.
Yeah. So I'll take it 'cause Amy's not here. But I'll tell you from, from the standpoint of how the model works. A lot of that growth, especially what's baked into the 7-8 for this year, is baked into what we believe the sales performance. The key is the add-ons that get onto the base. So the way we do add-ons, Banno Business being an add-on, is that those particular products or features get added to the base of the 12.6 million customers that Ben referenced. So each of those have, you know, various price points. They're not nothing's equal, but just to put it in some level of perspective, they could be, you know, from a nickel to 50 cents, you know, additional in that particular feature.
That's really where things start to materialize, is that the things that he's built on top of the retail platform, and there's a whole host of Banno Conversations, was an example, Banno Business, that's really where that additional growth will come. And I know this whole group is looking for, you know, when is Jack Henry gonna, you know, you know, breach that 8% growth barrier? The things that we are doing are that is that opportunity, as Mimi said, to get to the high 7s% or breach the 8s%, and those are all contributing factors to that.
Can I?
Oh, sure, yeah.
Just one thing to add to that. Remember that curve that Ben showed, that was the adoption curve, the growth? It's getting adoption in the institution. So if they're at 50% penetration today with utilization, moving it to 60, moving it to 70, that ramps, too.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I guess I have two questions. First of all, on Moov. So Moov is basically a merchant acquirer. You guys are the sales channel, and you get a rev share. And do the banks have to agree and also get a rev share just because the banks basically are the only way you have access to those Banno clients? Do they get some spiff for that, too?
They could. So, you know, there'll be some that I'm sure that want to negotiate, and maybe now that they're listening, they'll for sure want to negotiate.
Sorry.
No, I'm just, I was just joking with you. But no, we've contemplated that already as part of the equation, so yes. But the key for the questions that were asked of me earlier about the merchant acquiring. So Moov is the merchant acquirer. Moov is taking the risk. Jack Henry is not on that side, so that variability is completely on Wade and his... And they got all the systems and tools to make all that happen. And then there is a rev share based on the total. And then, of course, there's some drag along products and things like that, that we talked about that would come with our PayCenter offering or potentially come with additional Banno, you know, users and/or sales deals that would come as part of that being a product.
But the real key for the longer, longer term is what Ben talked about with the SDK. So that SDK gives us the ability to change the dynamic for the industry, not just for what we are doing in Banno, but what we are doing with our competitors. So the only way our competitors are gonna get access to that is through the SDK that we offer through Moov, and so that changes, and of course, we get cuts of all those transactions. So that's really where the long, long-term growth. Again, there'll be differentiation in what we offer, but that will change the TAM significantly over time.
Yeah. Gotcha. Thanks. And just the one follow-up, in the past, I think last year in the Analyst Day, I think you guys talked about 7%-8% kind of medium-term revenue growth. Is that... I, I don't think it was in this, but is that still the general expectation medium term?
I'd say the next couple of years, that's a safe assumption, and then as we learn more through the tech modernization projects, we want to understand the ...
Yeah, and I think it's, you know, I think we just stay focused on for this year. Obviously, there's very little of this SMB in the field, but you got Data Broker, you saw a lot of that. There was very little of that in this year. You got the product rationalization. You have all the things that we've been building towards that will have an opportunity. Financial crimes. All the things that we've been building out now will have a chance to have the runway, and that's where I think you see that nearer opportunity. The former CEO in the back.
So afte r years of answering the questions, I want to ask a question. I know I'm not supposed to do this, but I'm gonna anyway. So I don't know if this is for Ben or you, Greg, but, there was lots of commentary on the stage, in a few presentations about the importance of Conversations and how Conversations plays into this and that. I don't know that everybody in the room necessarily knows exactly what Conversations is or why that is such an enabler for what we're doing. So can one of you guys just make sure everybody knows what Conversations is and why that's the foundation for a lot of what we're talking about here?
That's a good... Go ahead.
Yeah, I can take that. One of the things we wanted to crack with this digital self-service set of tooling, in traditional mobile banking apps, you don't have, like, a built-in help desk. At its simplest description, this is just a built-in help desk to the app. Now, in your mind, you're probably like, "Well, that's just chat." It's actually minimally used for chat. I'll give you some use case examples to build the intuition. I wake up in the morning, I see three transactions that I don't think I made.
I can go, bink, bink, bink, take those transactions, attach them to a conversation, and say, "Hey, Mr. or Mrs. Banker, or customer support person, "I didn't—I don't think I made these." That's actually about 40%-50% of the usage right now is just like, "Hey, these, these transactions I don't think are made." And then immediately, what happens then at the bank or the credit union is they can take those, and they can get those immediately over to the fraud team via internal messaging, and everybody's looking at the same thing. Also, then, let's just say I have 12 accounts, and I'm the customer support rep. They can go, "Hey, Ben, which account was that?" And they can push the UI back to me. So it's a really clever way of us just re-kind of rebuilding the app around a service experience.
So what we were effectively trying to tackle is how do you keep that service, relationships, and trust go to market that our customers have? How do you keep that front and center in a digital experience, and how do you bring people back into the app? There's a weird thing, like basically all the humans left the app. Like, there's no humans in banking, right? We're bringing the humans back in, allowing them to build differentiation. Now, what we're effectively saying to Dave's question, which is, thank you for asking it, is we now believe that this is how the financial institutions in the future will just operate this way, especially with AI, because we can see automation coming now. I send these three transactions, let me get another one. Address change is another common one.
They need to change their address. So they can do that conversationally, and they can get this wonderful service experience that says, "Ben, cool. There's four groups that have to approve your address change. Here's how that's happening. Here's us coming through the app," et cetera, et cetera. We actually build tons of features this way, so there's a ton of features built out into this experience. So think of it as a built-in help desk for our customers to be able to service the digital channel, and what we're doing now is taking that outside of a Banno context, and we're gonna allow that to be adopted. If you know a fintech, like, there's fintechs that are doing this as standalone companies. We have one of those already.
So, we're gonna break that out and then start to offer that outside of a Banno context, and then it also services for that front office, back office. Did I do an okay job there?
Yeah.
The one other thing, if I could add-
Yeah, yeah.
Get into it, right? That it's a secured, authenticated channel.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is super important.
Yeah, I was gonna say the same thing.
Because, like, we now have a guarantee that I know who Kartik is when he's talking to me, right? So I know who you are. A lot of these chat channels are like basically cesspools of fraudulent activity. So right now, we don't even offer it outside of authentication. We will over time for different variants of, like, account opening and other things, but right now, you're fully authenticated, meaning you've two-factor auth'd, and we know who you are. By we, I mean the bank or the credit union.
Great. Two questions. One, maybe this is too granular, but in the survey you showed at the beginning, there were, I think, 22% of banks that were gonna spend the same or spend less. Is there any commonality as to those banks that are going to spend the same or less?
So, Lee, do you recall off the top? 'Cause Lee-
No, I think, I mean, Greg's thesis that he offered earlier, those banks that are not spending are-
More
... are probably got other things in the cards, other plans, are looking to do M&A. I can tell you that it, that particular section of responses did not change materially significantly from a statistical standpoint year over year, from the previous year or even the year before that. So it's, we get a number like that, a fairly similar number like that year over year.
And just a second question. So a lot of talk about AI, a lot of talk about how AI can help banks and productivity. I'm wondering, you know, what's the opportunity for Jack Henry? Because I'm assuming with AI, is going to come more fraud, right? Or banks scared of fraud. Is there an opportunity for Jack Henry to benefit... maybe that's the wrong word, but sell products that can help banks with that?
And we are. We're not ready to talk about that yet. But we have filed a couple patents on some things that we've been building, and that is absolutely with what you're discussing. With the data that we have, the data that we've built through some of the components and a few other things, but I think that'll probably be more next year's conversation at this point.
Yeah, to give you an intuition for this, I was hinting at it with some of the questions earlier, but if you actually know the identity of the external internet user, and/or the semantics of how they're operating a device in a fraudulent way, you should be able to intuit that all the way down at the where the money is actually settled or processed and/or leaves the financial institution. So what we figured out is like, hey, again, this is a down the stack conversation, like, fraud just didn't get solved down there because you didn't have internet users in 1989. So now we're saying, okay, what if we could build an intercept mechanism, right? That would be the intuition for it. And, and then what if you can take all the models...
Again, like, or maybe I'll say it this way: There's not very many other companies like us who have built their own digital platform. We did. Not very many digital platforms that also have access to forty-plus years of legacy core building and know, we know how to help a bank or a credit union operate. So then we can actually, I believe, go in and fundamentally solve fraud. That then leads us to being able to do faster payments. So what I always say is, like, time is a great friend of payments. We built wire rooms and ACH warehouses for what? Like, why did we build them? Time is both a great friend on the fraud side, but then it's also a great friend for revenue opportunities for both us and our customers, right?
I think it's pretty clear in the fintech space, people are willing to pay for time, right? So we think that the three of those things as pillars, we get all those right, this can contribute in a massive way, you know, in the future, to all the numbers you're wondering about.
In our private roadmaps that we do not share outside of clients, we have had discussions with our clients on timing when some of that stuff will be developed. So, we're not just talking pie in the sky, we're actually already working on it.
I'll give you maybe another. There's a bank here in this country who came under a pretty big attack, and we were able to take the fraud to zero immediately. We're in pilot phase with some of this work. It's gonna come to more fruition, and you'll hear it from Greg and Mimi, you know, as that comes but this is real. This isn't just like slideware. We're actually building it.
Can I tag one thing on to the first question? We one thing that we do know this year from the survey results this year, credit unions were more bullish on their tech spend generally, relative to banks. That was, but that was again, in the February timeframe when we actually fielded the study. The thing I wanted to let everybody know is that Jack Henry also sponsors Bank Director's Bank Technology Survey, and that's gonna be coming out just in the next-
Or-
week or so.
September 10th.
September tenth, yeah. And there's gonna be some. We, through our sponsorship, put some really interesting data-specific questions that have never been asked to a statistically significant pool of banks before. So I would just. You're gonna wanna take a look at that survey and the findings. One of which, by the way, to tag on to the data question, is that most banks are under the perception that they have 50%-75% of their own current account holders' financial data when they do not. They don't fully appreciate just how financially fragmented the average account holder relationship is, how many other financial service providers, financial apps, et cetera, that they're using.
All the things that Ben's mentioned about Finicity and outbound open banking based aggregation that brings the balance of that data to fill in those data deficits of banks' existing and credit unions' existing account holders is really key to driving some of the most interesting kind of applications that AI and other data-driven kind of financial services are gonna bring to bear.
If we say it more simply, there's a massive opportunity for us to win in payments if we solve these other things. Right now, nobody's turning on send end-user experiences for RTP or FedNow. Why? Because of account takeover, right, at scale. So account takeover at scale is a problem, and we can see a path in which we can allow our banks, credit unions to really play in that space in a meaningful way, and it'll be a game changer.
Thanks for taking the questions. So I guess first one here, it's been discussed today, and then it's all been discussed, you know, for a while now. But the wins that you've been having with the larger banks, a lot of that's been driven by the tech modernization. But at the beginning of the presentation, you outlined the large client strategy delivery. So could you just add more color as to what that means and how that strategy differs, you know, to this unique client base?
You want me to take it or you?
Yeah.
Okay. So one of the things that we were focused on was, to sell to the larger clients, you need a different strategy. You need to be able to show back to credibility, that you can do what you say you're gonna do. So part of that was to form a team, and we have several folks that we've hired from larger institutions that are part of this team that we brought into the fold. That focus has been to date, exclusively on banks, but now we're building it out for the larger credit union opportunities. Of course, there's not as many of those, but there are some of those out there.
So part of it was bringing in talent from the outside that actually had experience working and knowing how to work within the larger banks, but really helping them understand. It's amazing how many of the larger banks still don't fully understand their payment strategy, don't fully understand the utilization of some of the software that they can get to get better benefit and adoption. And so part of it is partnering with the institution during the sales process, all the way through the implementation process. So the person that I mentioned, Sue Geiss, who's been with us for 29 years, she worked at larger institutions before, but also she's been she led our implementation group for the last, you know, 10 + years. So she's able to take it from truly cradle to grave and longer, right?
So she's going to be with them through the sales process, with Brian and his team and her folks, all the way through the implementation and owning the implementation of that, all the way through continuing to service the account for the long term. And so what we've seen with the larger institutions, we just resigned several of our large, very large ones, and part of it was because we were able to show that strategy. Because most of them, because the M&A market's getting ready to get a little ripe, most of them are looking to take from whatever asset size they are today to something 2x and 3x , and they wanna make sure that we can support that. So that's really been the strategy, and now we're gonna take it to the credit union side, too.
I think to add to that, Greg commented on the acquisition market, right? A lot of these institutions, as they're joining, as they're merging together, are crossing over thresholds that they've never had to worry about before. There's a whole different level of compliance that's there. We've taken more institutions over that threshold, really, than any of our competition has. We can help them make sure they address it.
Yeah, most of them don't wanna go from nine to 10 billion. They wanna go from nine to 13 or 14 or 15.
Right.
They wanna make a big enough jump to actually make sure that they can handle the offset of the cost. So does that answer your question?
Yeah, definitely. Then just the second one, you know, obviously, you guys are innovating with a large focus on public cloud, but you can only innovate and clients can only adopt to the point where the regulators are allowing it. So can you just give a framework for understanding where the regulators are at with, you know, public cloud adoption for the FIs?
Oh, sure.
-and how that matches up with you?
Ben, Ben loves this one.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a story here. We've told it in different forms. Banno came into this company with a cloud-first platform. So we were in AWS when we came in. We then took the platform internal to our own data centers while we worked with regulators to build a framework to basically provide oversight for how we did public cloud. In public cloud, you gotta remember, these are still just servers and data centers and wires. It's the same thing. The difference is automation, right? That's the difference. And all these fancy, you know, words like, you know, CI/CD and all kind of technical stuff, right? Infrastructure as code. So we had infrastructure as code running ten years ago. So we were a massive automation shop. We worked with the regulator.
I personally was in rooms with regulators for two to three weeks at a time, and then we built... I think this is in the public now. Our customers have access to it, but we built a set of documents that they needed to understand what we're doing. Those set of documents now have formed structure, and then, of course, over the last ten years, like, these control frameworks, like FFIEC guidelines and all of those now have adopted, you know, different things. The short answer is, we've been a leader in public cloud. Our regulators are good with what we're doing, and the most simplest way to say it is, I always ask regulators, like: "Why are you here?
Are you here because of the computers and the software or the humans?" They're here because of the humans. Well, one of the things that's possible with public cloud automation is removal of humans. So when you can remove humans, now you have a much more secure environment. My belief is that long-term regulators will prefer it. I'm not trying to tell Washington, DC, what to do. I just think that long term, over time, they'll just prefer it as the understanding comes for how you can actually do automation and control.
But the only thing I'll caveat is that the process of moving clients to the public cloud, en masse, is still years away, for a whole host of reasons. But the more that we're building our solutions and tools and building them in a component-based approach, we can give them bits and bytes of that along the way to get them and the regulators comfortable with that approach. Again, Banno is an example, and several of our other complementary and payment products are already sitting in the cloud today.
And have been for a while.
Yeah
... under full regulatory dress.
So that gives them a lot of comfort on both sides, both the client and the regulators.
Just to buttress what Greg was saying, the have it your way, we will have customers that probably won't, in the near term, do anything in the public cloud.
Right.
They just don't want to right now for various reasons, and that's fine, too. Then we have folks that are aggressively adopting, like, super aggressive, you know?
That is why we're continuing to invest in our existing core. You know, there's still things that we're building. There's still things that we wanna change. We got two new leaders that are looking at new ways to do things as well. But again, we wanna continue and advance that as we're moving everything else forward.
I think we're pretty much at time on the agenda. With that, I would like to thank everybody here in Dallas and everybody online for joining us this year for the Jack Henry Investor Day. For those of you here in Dallas, the reception is going to start right now. They're ready for us. If you are gonna be able to join us, you can follow Justin right out the door there on the end of the room. Thank you, everybody.
Thank you.