Good morning, everyone. My name is Chuck Nabhan. I cover the payment transaction services and fintech space here at Stephens. Pleased to have with me today, Greg Adelson, who is the CEO of Jack Henry. Greg, thank you for joining us today.
Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me.
Great. Really appreciate your time and your participation again this year. So just as a starting point, just give us a high-level overview of Jack Henry, the three segments and the markets you serve?
Yeah, sure. So we consider ourselves a 48-year-old fintech company, well-rounded financial technology company is what we like to describe ourselves. So we're actually broken into four segments, three that are primarily the product side. But we have our core segment, we have our payment segment, we have our complementary segment, and we have a corporate segment. And so if you kind of think about the breakdown of the individual segments, payments makes up about 37% of the overall revenue for the company. And then complementary and payments. So payments is made up of really four different groups. So you have our EPS group, which is Enterprise Payment Solutions, which is ACH origination, and remote deposit capture is the bulk of what that solution is. We have our card business in that group.
We have our bill pay business, which is made up of both iPay and our Payrailz acquisition that we did two years ago, and then the fourth group and the fastest growing of the four is our PayCenter group, which is really our faster payments group, which has everything connected with Zelle, RTP, and FedNow. That's about 37% of our overall, as I said, in the payments group, and then everything else is complementary, so if it's not in the payments group, not in the core, it's considered complementary. The complementary and the core groups make up about 30% of the overall revenue, and then the difference of about 3% or 4% is our corporate group.
Great. I'm going to start with some high-level questions, and then we'll dive into the segments and some of the financial stuff. But as we're approaching year-end, could you touch on expectations for IT spend in 2025 and if you're seeing any changes or nuances from a demand perspective?
Yeah. So we actually do two surveys. One, we sponsor ourselves, and one, we co-sponsor with Bank Director. And both of those surveys were done in the January-February timeframe was our survey. And then the Bank Director one was in the June-July timeframe. Both of them showed that the surveyed institutions, of course, the ones we did were our institutions. The one Bank Director did was more of a broader base. Both of them showed about a 6% to 10% planned increase in technology spending in 2025. And again, they were done at six months apart, but both of them had basically the same results. And we're actually seeing that right now in our results. So we had a very good first quarter. Our pipeline remains the largest it's ever been in the history of the company.
When we're seeing what folks are doing out in the market and what's kind of coupled with what we're seeing in our pipeline, we believe that those numbers are very accurate.
Great. And if I'm correct, that 6%-10% is roughly in line with historical levels. But are you seeing any changes in prioritization of solutions or functions at all?
The last two years, the prioritization has flipped a little bit, but still, deposit growth still remains number one in both of those years. We've also seen a flip a little bit in operational efficiency from lending growth. So operational efficiency was number three in the past, but now it's number two. And lending growth was number three, and fraud mitigation was number four. So really, those four have really kind of maintained over the last two years, just kind of flipped a little, but.
Got it. So I know you disclosed non-GAAP results that exclude deconversion revenue, but your GAAP results are subject to variability with M&A and consolidation. So with that said, with the change of the administration, I wanted to see if you had any thoughts on M&A and consolidation in the bank market heading into next year.
Yeah. Interestingly, we received some calls from our financial institutions on the Wednesday after the election that said they were already receiving inbound calls from institutions that they were targeting that are now ready to move. So we have a lot of conversations with our customers, whether that be at our client conference that we recently held or in customer meetings that I attend and our team attends. And I will tell you that the pent-up demand of M&A is coming. And we're seeing it not only with what we're hearing from our clients, but what we're hearing from others in the industry. I had a conversation with the head of the ICBA just on Monday, actually. And she indicated that she's hearing a lot of the same stuff.
So not only are we hearing M&A is going to pick up, definitely opportunities for regulatory concerns and scrutinies to maybe lessen, specifically from the CFPB and some things that are coming there. So all of those will continue to help kind of drive this M&A market. We as a company actually are looking at kind of the average age of some of the CEOs that are in our institutions' roles today, looking at their succession plans, understanding kind of where they're going to be going. And that usually is a pretty strong indication. If they're not buying technology and they're not doing anything else, they're probably positioning themselves potentially for M&A.
It's a good segue into my next question, which is, it's tough to say who's going to acquire who and what's going to happen over the next couple of years. But historically speaking, how has your client base fared under consolidation cycles? And I guess, secondly, you've moved up market a little bit within the bank space, and we could get to that a little later. But do you anticipate any changes in how your client base?
No, honestly, we've fared very well through the years. If you look at a decreasing market over the last 40 years of consolidation, Jack Henry's either maintained our market share or grown our market share. In fact, if you look at our latest 10-K, we actually show we had market share growth last year when I don't think anybody else in the market did. So from that standpoint, we're continuing to grow. Our institutions are continuing to get larger. The average Jack Henry institution from four years ago has grown 27% on the banking side and 34% on the credit union side. So our average bank is now $1.3 billion in assets. Our average credit union is $1.2 billion. Well, some of that has come through general organic growth of the institution.
Some of that has come from the products and services that we've been able to provide them that help them either do some M&A. And the other part is what we have actually targeted intentionally to go up market. So in fiscal year 2024, and our fiscal year ends June the 30th, by the way, so we're only four months into our fiscal year 2025, we closed 15 multi-billion dollar institutions compared to only five the year before. And even this past quarter that we just announced where we had six competitive core wins, three of those were multi-billion, and one of those was a $7 billion institution. So as we continue to move up market, our institutions get larger. That creates more opportunity for us to be on the winning end of those.
You can kind of see even through our deconversion revenue that we've announced over the last really year and a half, those have been very much in line, not what we used to have the big ebbs and flows from years past.
Got it. And as you move up market, and I know you're still serving the credit union and smaller bank space, are you seeing anything different from a competitive standpoint, either in the core space or in complementary or payments?
You know, we have on a complementary and payments. We actually have institutions that we have a $200 billion institution in our payments platforms today. And we have several. So from a core perspective, our largest core is about $50 billion. And we have 21 cores that are over $15 billion. So it's not like we don't have customers of size. And so as we've moved up market, most of those customers have grown with us organically. The largest customer that we've actually acquired new was about $17 billion, and they're now $50 billion. So we've been able to work with them. So we're used to seeing what's happening in that market. To answer your question very directly, I think what we're seeing more is what the competition is trying to do to save some of those clients as we continue to go up market.
And so from a technology standpoint, we don't really see anything new coming out of them today. And so a lot of what we see is some level of irrational pricing. And so that's been a little bit more prevalent than maybe in years past. And so we've kind of seen that a little bit more, especially as we've gone into some of their client base. But the reality is we're very comfortable with where we are. When we start, our focus is always about community and regional financial institutions. There isn't anybody else in the space that can say that, that that's 100% of our focus. By the way, it's 99.8% of our revenue comes from community and regional financial institutions. And so when we're able to go in there and sell our culture, our service, our technology, our strategy, and our execution, there's a pretty good story there.
Got it, and as we distance ourselves from zero interest rate, zero interest rates, are you seeing anything different in the private side of the market from a competitive standpoint?
No, not really. I mean, we've shifted. To your point, there's a lot of people in the banking industry that never saw interest rates move at all, right, that have been in since 2008 or 2009. But for us, no, we haven't really seen anything different. And so we're continuing to evaluate and move, but nothing significantly different.
Great. All right. So I'm going to dive into the core segment. So been a steady grower for some time. If you could just remind us what the growth, the normalized growth algorithm is for that business, as well as touching on the end-to-end strategy, which is a starting point. I think it's one of the key drivers of that segment.
Yeah. So a couple of things. So our normal algorithm for core is about 6%-7% growth. So the guidance we just gave for this year was 7%-8%. Core is about 6%-7%. Just might as well give you the rest. Payments is somewhere between 7%-8.5%. And complementary is usually 8%-9%. So somewhere in that range is kind of where the three big segments are. But when you look at what we have done over the last several years, really going back seven or eight years, we've been averaging about 45%-55% new competitive core wins. And I want to emphasize that because these are logos we are taking from our competitors. They're not moving from a Jack Henry core to a Jack Henry core. They're 100% of what I just said are coming from our competitors.
And if you think about a market that typically only sees about 100 deals a year that truly are moving, we're winning 40%-55% of the market every single year. And so that has really helped us. Some of what we had already talked about, the things that I had emphasized related to culture, service, technology, strategy, and execution have been big reasons. We'll probably dive into a few of our innovative technology that we've been working on. The second part is what you described, which is when we move a customer from an in-house processing account to our private cloud. And so we have 74% of our clients today that are in the private cloud.
When that happens, when a customer moves from in-house to our private cloud, it's about a 1.75% or 1.75 times increase in our revenue from that in-house customer to them now becoming a private cloud. So it's about closer to two times on the bank side and about one and a half times on the credit union. And we're equally distributed at this point. So it's about 1.75. Point being is that we're continuing to see we have about a four- or five-year good runway, I think, left at moving 40%-45%, which is what we've been doing. And we're on track and believe we'll do that again this year. But what's going to happen is we'll have some folks that don't move from in-house to the private cloud. They'll wait for the public cloud. And what we are building is a public cloud core.
We're breaking out all the components and building a core basically from each of the components, and people have the option to actually buy those components as individual components, as a bundle, or wait till the full core is completed. We've already completed 10 of those components, and most of those are being utilized within the business today in kind of a shared services mindset where authorization management, things like that, exception item processing that ends up being used in a multitude of businesses. We used to take the approach where we built it in all of our businesses. Now we built it once. They use it through an API, so there's a lot of opportunity to cut some of our development costs over time, we have three of those components that are going to be utilized for monetization.
So we have a product called Data Broker, which is kind of a data lake kind of mindset where all of the data that our customers gather from core payments, lending, digital, fraud, all in one place have access to gather that. And then the other two products are really already out there. So we have a new general ledger that we've created that's now out in kind of an early adopter phase, and then our domestic and international wires platform. So all four of those will be monetized components. The other ones, we're kind of waiting for other pieces of the core to be done. We will, and have announced, that we will have a deposit-only consumer and commercial-based core available in 2026 in the public cloud. And we are on track to make that happen.
So I gave you a lot more answer, but I covered a few other things I think that you wanted to talk about that gives everybody a perspective on just not only the technology innovation that we're doing, but the level of execution that we are doing, which again is resonating with the clients and prospects that we're talking to.
That's great. And you may have answered this question already with your description of the product set and some of the innovations you've had. But getting back to the idea of moving up market and selling into larger institutions, I wanted to double-click on the specific factors that have enabled you to move up market, whether it's something in your go-to-market approach or your product set. But if you could kind of touch on some of the drivers, I think that'd be helpful.
Yeah. The real opportunities for us to go up market have been around the innovative technology, not just in the core or core strategy, but the things that we've launched in financial crimes. What we've done in PayCenter, we're the only competitive core out there today that has all of their cores connected to the faster payment rails. Our competition does not have all of their cores connected today. So depending on what core you're on is what availability you have to some of those faster payment rails. So for us, there's an opportunity for us to leverage that and do some things creatively, whether that's banking as a service features or payments as a service features that we've been really highly focused on and doing a good job. So that's kind of resonated with the larger customers. The other thing that's resonated is the ability to truly buy modules.
So if you have a homegrown core, and a lot of them do, as you know, as you go up market, you may not be really happy with the general ledger that you've had for 25 years. So you have the ability to actually replace just the general ledger. And by the way, we've created some AI components into that general ledger. And we're continuing to add functionality. But my point being is you may want to say, "I don't want to do a full core change, but there are some components that I would love to replace." And so you have that option with Jack Henry as we continue to build these out. So we'll have, and we are talking, by the way, to a couple of super regionals about that today and looking at three or four different modules that might make sense for them.
And then the other component is our ability to take some of our products outside the base. So we've talked about that. Jack Henry has 1,700 core clients, but we have 5,800 other clients that do not use our core today. So if you think about the number of institutions that are out there, which is roughly 9,500 banks and credit unions, Jack Henry has over 8,500 of those that actually use at least one of our products. So that is a big part of opportunity for us to continue to sell to these other institutions who have gotten a great experience with us on our service side or a product that we have and now looking at other complementary or other payment products or now other core products that we can actually sell to them.
Got it. Okay. One of the questions we got coming out of the quarter, the pace of competitive takeaways was a little below trend. I know weather was a factor, but on a normal year, you'll average 50 to 55 takeaways. Could you talk about what happened during the quarter as well as your expectations for the rest of the year?
Yeah. I think there's a little bit of a misnomer. I did say on the earnings call, we had a couple got pushed because of the hurricane. And of course, we're not going to go push people to close a deal. In fact, we were trying to help them in other ways. But the reality is we did have a couple that closed that got pushed. And we've already closed them, by the way. So that's part of that. But the reality is six closed in the quarter. Well, everybody was kind of going, "Oh, well, that's a low number." Well, if you go back the last four years, last year we closed 10, but the two years prior to that, we closed six and six. So I mean, six has been a normal number for us to still get to our 45-55.
As I mentioned, last year, we did 10 in the first quarter, but closed 57 for the year. We believe, based on pipeline, based on teams execution, that we will definitely be in that 50-55 again this year.
Great. I want to switch gears to complementary. You had indicated that the normalized revenue growth rate is in the 8%-9% range, which is obviously accretive to the overall pace. But underneath that all, I wanted to start with Banno. And for anybody that's attended the investor day, I personally find that to be one of the more interesting pieces listening to Ben talk about some of the innovation. But I guess just as a starting point, if you could just tell us about Banno, how that's came to develop over the years, as well as some of the more recent innovations and solutions there.
Yeah, sure. So anything Ben talks about can be pretty interesting anyway. He's our CTO, but Ben came with the acquisition. We acquired Banno in 2014, but they back then were really just a web-based company. They had done some other stuff. I actually met them at Finovate in New York in 2012 and brought them into our organization to help us with some things, but over time, we really morphed into determining that we needed to upgrade our digital offering, so Banno is the digital application, digital and mobile, digital banking and mobile application for our clients, so we started that. We actually launched that product in 2018, and so in six years, we've gone from basically zero to 13 million users on that platform, so it's the fastest growing platform in the country over the six-year period.
The other thing that's interesting is that if you think about your own bank applications, and especially if you bank with one of the larger tier ones, your experience on your laptop and your experience on your mobile phone are not the same, well they are with Banno, and so everything that you do and utilize has the exact same experience, so that's a big differentiator for us. It's also the first public cloud-native digital application, so if you think about all the other players in the space, they were not built from a public cloud digital native. A lot of them actually have single instances from a standpoint of how you can actually even roll that out. It's one at a time. We can roll out. We've done as many 50 implementations in a month with Banno on how we've constructed the architecture of that.
The other thing is that it is a product that kind of follows the Jack Henry Open philosophy. So one of the key things that Banno has as a differentiator, as a retail application, which is really what it was launched as, it is, honestly, I think, second to none. I'm a little biased, but second to none, and if you look at App Store ratings, it's always at the top or in the top two of the App Store ratings on a consistent basis. We have 950 clients that are live today on that platform, and I'll get to the business application in a minute, but if you look at the retail application, we have already embedded 172 plugins into that application and close to 50 third-party integrations. There isn't anybody in the country that has that level of integration.
And again, a testament to our company's philosophy on openness and the ability to make that happen. So all of our customers have the ability to get utilization of a lot of the great third-party fintechs that are already out there. And it's embedded already into our offering. Array being a great example of one if you're familiar with Array. So the other part that we were lacking, to be candid, is that we did not build the business application at the time we launched. And that was honestly on purpose. And business has a lot more detail that we needed to do. So we have rolled out various features of the business application. And as I mentioned at investor day, we are still not where we need to be on par with some of our larger competitors. So we are building that out.
We expect to be done in the next six to eight months to be more on par with some of the really key features that we think will be differentiators between a customer sticking with one of our competitors and coming to us for business. Regardless, we've already rolled out 182 customers on the Banno Business application and have over 100 still in the queue. We are still selling this very, very frequently. We're selling it to the 950 clients that are already live. As you can tell, we're roughly 30% penetrated with contracts and implementations already. That's kind of where we are right now with Banno.
That's great. Could you talk about the opportunity outside of the base?
Yeah. So I don't want to throw any real shade, but the reality is I just emphasized how open we are related to working with our competitors and others to have third-party integrations. In fact, we had 250 fintechs at our client conference just a few weeks ago, and some of them were our competitors. We don't let them sell core, but we let them sell whatever other products they have. Well, unfortunately, we're not getting the same love back on trying to do some of our third-party integrations on digital in particular. And so we're working through some differences on what we think we can do, building out a different approach. I really don't want to indicate what that approach is yet.
But I will tell you, and I think we're going to get to the SMB product. I'll tie it back in when we get to the SMB product because it kind of ties into our philosophy on how we're going to do that.
Great. Okay. I want to touch on some of the other solutions within complementary as well. You talk a lot about Financial Crimes Defender. If you could touch on that one quickly, it seems to have gotten pretty good traction in the market. Any other key products for cross-sell you could touch on as well, I think would be helpful.
Yeah, for sure. So financial crimes is really our replacement of an existing product we have called Yellow Hammer. So it's roughly penetrated into about 500 institutions today. And it was getting a little long in the tooth, and we wanted to create something different. But we wanted to create something that was on a single platform. So Yellow Hammer is really two different applications for both BSA and AML, so Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money laundering. So just making sure that you have the ability to have that on a single platform. And the other thing that we wanted to do is we wanted to make it real-time.
And so, when you look at the competitors out in the space today, and there's a few key ones that I won't name names, but there's a few key ones that have a good market share as far as market share captive right now, but they don't have real-time components. And so our ability to get real-time out in the market has been a game changer for our ability to be successful selling it. So again, being candid, there's a few features that I think we still need to continue to add. And there's things that we are adding, which is kind of tying the timing of implementation to some of those ads. But today, we have 83 customers that are live. We have 133 that are in the queue to go live.
And then we also have created, because we've done faster, because we've done real-time, we've been able to create a module for faster payments. So if you think about the biggest concern with faster payments today is faster payments equals faster fraud. So we've been able to create a module that our customers can use for Zelle transactions, FedNow transactions, and we're finishing the one for the RTP transactions as we speak. So we actually have 37 clients that are live today on that faster payments module, and we have over 100 in the queue for that too. So the combination of those two things and what we are doing in the real-time has created a nice opportunity for us with a lot of runway. And we still have some, as I said, over close to 500 Yellow Hammer customers to continue to migrate over as well.
The other thing that I would say in the complementary segment is we haven't talked a lot about this, but we are launching this in January, is in what we call an early adopter phase, but we have built a solution to combine our LoanVantage product, which is our lending product, and it typically was more of a commercial-based lending product in the past, but we've built a consumer platform to go on top of it, so we now have a single platform for consumer and commercial lending, and we've taken an acquisition we did, I think, 2018 or 2019 called Bolts, which was an account opening solution, we've put that into the solution, so we now have an enterprise account origination solution tied with the opening tied to both consumer and commercial lending.
We will launch that in January with a few customers in the early adopter phase. I feel very optimistic about what we've created and how it competes in the market with some of the names that you would know.
Like nCino.
Correct. You said that, yes.
This is a cloud-native solution, just to be correct.
Yes, it is. Correct.
Great. Okay. So that's a good segue into payments. One of the announcements out of the investor day was your partnership with Moov. Could you maybe touch on that quickly and what that brings to the platform?
Yeah, it brings a significant, so let me quickly describe Moov. So Moov is really, I think, the latest acquirer processor that is connected to Visa and Mastercard today, built public cloud native. So again, when you think about all the players that are out there today, the traditionals of First Data and TSYS and everybody else, and even Stripe and Square and others, they're not publicly cloud native, built public cloud native. So it was built public cloud native. It sits in Google Cloud, just like we do today. We know the CEO very well because he was the CEO of Banno when we acquired them. And so we have a great relationship with him. And we've been working through this for about a year and a half before we were ready to really talk about it for a lot of reasons. But the essence is this.
We are going to provide an acquirer processor offering to our institutions and only to our institutions. We're not going to sell directly to their customers. We're not going to go around their customers because what we do is make sure that our community and regional financial institutions are successful. That is our focus. So we will sell through them. We have Mastercard and Visa working with us on some significant marketing dollars to make that a very successful entrée into the space. They're both very excited about what we're doing. We've showed them this very early on. And then also, what we're going to do for our institutions is we are actually going to sell this to our clients for free. We're going to give it to them. Why? Because we're going to get the money off of the SMB. So what's in it for the financial institution?
They're going to be able to take deposits, which are four and a half times the regular size of a retail deposit. 98% of all SMBs are actually sole proprietors. So most of those sole proprietors, and maybe some of you in this room, actually have LLCs, and you're using your retail account at your bank and credit union to fund those and access those. So you're not paying true SMB fees. Well, we have ways to fish you out and to make sure that that is known and have opportunities for the bank and credit union to get some income that way. And then the other big one for the institution is that the average SMB, only 16% of the SMBs actually bank at the same bank that they have their retail account. Why? Because they don't have any offerings.
So it's a huge opportunity for those SMBs to stay at the community and regional financial institutions instead of going to the super regionals and the tier ones. What's in it for the SMB? And this is the big one. Four key things. I'll make it quick. One, single-button approval. They actually put all their information in. We have all their information off of the core. They're already on our core today. So they actually put their information in. We can give them an approval or decline in a single button. They can't get that today. What they get today is a two- to three-day process to get approved.
As soon as they get approved, they'll get a message directly downloaded to their phone that will say, "You are now able to start taking tap-to-pay payments." Both iOS and Android phones will be the first one out with both iOS and Android, and that's a key thing. Most everybody only has iOS today. Third thing, because of the way Moov was built and it's a public cloud-native approach and some of the other things that they built, they have eight settlement windows a day, so if you think about the SMB cash flow challenges, they're going to be able to, if they want, to get and receive money eight times a day as transactions are occurring. That's going to be a significant lift for them for cash flow perspective.
And the biggest one and one that we're actually filing some patents on is what we are calling account reconciliation or continuous account reconciliation. So if any of you ever had a small business or understand this, the biggest concern for a sole proprietor or a small business is their ability to reconcile the transactions that occurred to the deposit that actually hits their account. So that deposit will come, whether it's eight times a day or one time a day or whatever time they want it. But it will not only come with just an amount of $2,369, but that amount will have all of the transactions that occurred that actually totaled up to that deposit amount shown on their phone directly in their app. They will be able to download that into QuickBooks or to Xero or whatever their account system is.
They don't have to change accounting systems to work with us. They don't have to do any of that kind of stuff. So we ran some pilots on this with a couple of small businesses that we knew, and it saved them 20-25 hours a week. So if you think about a sole proprietor, that is significant. So that's the big summary. We will launch this in May as what we call an early adopter phase, as I've referenced a couple of times. And then our plan is by late summer to roll this out to all 950-plus Banno customers by then at one time.
Got it. I want to quickly touch on some financial items and open it up to Q&A. One, you touched on the 7%-8% normalized or long-term growth target, which you've consistently been able to deliver on. But one question I get is, what could take Jack Henry to the next level beyond that 8%? I know you talked about some of the products and some of the innovation you have, but maybe just to put a finer point on some of that discussion, what could take Jack Henry to the next level?
Yeah, I think it is a lot of the stuff that we've talked about. I think this Moov product that I mentioned for the SMB space is going to have a couple of phases, and so this first phase is what I described, but we have plans for additional phases that we think will continue to add value. If you think of this market today, Stripe only has 5% of the market, and you think about the value of Stripe today, there's huge opportunities for that market. What we're doing collectively in the core space and our other product space, as I mentioned, with new innovative technology. Again, what needs to happen for us is that some of the fruits of our labor that we've had over the last couple of years to truly come out and start to get implemented.
So it's not going to happen in fiscal year 2025. I'll just go ahead and tell you unless something drastically changes. But do I think it could happen in 2026 or 2027? I do, because there's a huge focus on our company to get over that 8% growth threshold. And we believe the things that we're working on are going to get us there.
Got it. I also want to touch on capital allocation and balance sheet. I know free cash flow gets a lot of attention. There's a lot of moving pieces with the deductibility of R&D. If you could just walk us through the expectations for free cash flow and how we should think about that.
Yeah, I mean, I can basically kind of just go with what we gave as a guide, which was 65 to 75. But the real reason is that we're still working, to your point. If regulation changes and there's a lot of talk about what's Section 174?
174.
Yeah, yeah. As soon as 174, we believe that that would change. If 174 changes, there could be a refund for us because the end of our fiscal year is June 30th. But also, that would significantly change us back into the 90%-105% because that has been the big driver of why cash flow has gone down. We're continuing to pay off what little debt we have. We have less than $150 million in debt. We're paying that off. And we're continuing to look at share buyback opportunities, things that make sense for us. And we'll continue to look at M&A opportunities as well. But right now, from a guide, 65-75 unless something changes with 174, that's kind of where we are.
Great. Let's just quickly touch on M&A. Just give us a sense for what you're seeing from a valuation standpoint, as well as any specific areas that you would look to add in organically to your product set.
Yeah, valuations haven't changed dramatically. I mean, they're still coming down a little bit. But we've always been a disciplined acquirer, so that hasn't changed. We have done 48 acquisitions in 48 years, but we haven't done any in the last two years, and we've only done a couple in the last five or six, and it's really been more intentional. Candidly, we were always in the past looking for ways to fill gaps of products that we didn't have. We don't have that challenge anymore. In fact, I'm looking at things on the opposite way. What I call product rationalization is that I think in some ways we might have too many products.
Making sure that we move out the things that aren't moving the needle for our customers or then ultimately moving the needle for us could help with margin improvement, could help with some other components, and also higher revenue growth rates because a lot of these are low revenue growth numbers or low margin numbers. So they would help on both sides of the coin. And they're all small businesses, by the way. But what I think is going to be the biggest opportunity for us is just like we did with Payrailz, we were looking very specifically for something that would accelerate our tech modernization strategy. And they were a public cloud-native built. They gave us an opportunity to knock off a couple of years of development that we thought that we needed at a time to accelerate.
Again, we want to seize the market right now because we think we have an opportunity with what's going on with our competition at this point. And so we wanted to be very aggressive in that. And we are. And it's paying off. We're getting good results from that acquisition. So we'll continue to look at things in payments. We'll look at things in fraud. We'll look at things in AI. And there could be some components in lending as well. But I would say payments, fraud, and AI would be the three primary. And then there could be some offsets with either digital or lending.
Got it. And I know you touched on this quickly. I was going to ask about some of the product rationalization initiatives, but just to be clear, that is an area of priority and focus for the firm as well.
100%. It's one of my strategic priorities that I came in with what I wanted to move out. It's kind of a good to great principle. You can't be great at 300 products. Our customers agree. And so since we have an open philosophy, let's embrace it and say, "Hey, there's companies out there that have built features that their entire company's built on a feature. We don't have to be everything to everybody. Let's go be the best we can be at the things that we need to be the best at.
Great. I'm going to stop there and see if anybody in the audience has any questions.
Yes. Typically, what are the main reasons for competitive takeaways? What are your customers saying? Why do they choose to go to a Microsoft server OS?
So the question was, what are the main reasons for competitive takeaways? So we had 50 prospects at our client conference. So they were from pretty much everybody you would think of. And I sat down with 15 of those CEOs that were there that attended our CEO forum. And honestly, regardless of where they fell into whomever they were with and primarily the two that you would consider our two biggest competitors, it really came down to the things that we emphasize. Service has fallen off and in some cases gotten as bad as it ever had been. And our service is still highly. ABA just told us that our service is the highest scored of any of the providers. So service has been a big deal. Our technology innovation has been big, the strategy, but it's not just the strategy anymore. It's the execution of the strategy.
Because five or six years ago, I don't think folks believed that Jack Henry would execute on what we said we were going to do, and we are. And that has been a big driver. The other part is really just understanding that there's more to core than just core. And when you buy a core, you want to be able to have the tight integration with some of these key innovative products in payments and complementary and whatever. And they see what we've been doing and where we've been going. And they like that. So I would say, honestly, the things that we're doing outside of the core other than our core overall strategy is driving more of the core wins.
Great. Any other questions? Yes.
So when your comment was about them struggling last year, so is this during what component? After SVB type stuff or? Yeah. So honestly, we have a lot of conversations with our banks and credit unions, and they didn't view themselves as struggling. In fact, most of them, they looked at CRE. They looked at other things that we thought a lot of people assumed were challenges for the community and regional institutions, and ours disagreed. So there really wasn't a concern from that standpoint. The biggest concern that we see and the reason why some of our institutions, I believe, will either be candidates to be bought or be candidates to be the acquirers is their investment in technology.
If they embrace the things that they need to go do to improve deposit growth, to improve operational efficiency, and we have a lot of them, regardless of size. We have some $2 billion institutions that are really innovative, and they're going to continue to buy other institutions over time, so it isn't always about size. It's about the level of innovation and the desire within the executive team, so candidly, we just didn't see some of the things and noise that were out there being reported.
Great. Any other questions? Well, Greg, I really appreciate you and Vance joining us today and your participation. I want to thank everybody in the audience for listening in and joining us as well. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, and thanks again. Have a great day.
Thank you all.