Okay, good morning, stockholders, employees, and friends. I'm David Foss, Board Chair of Jack Henry & Associates, and it is my pleasure to welcome all of you. In accordance with the notice of the meeting, I call to order the 48th Annual Meeting of Stockholders of Jack Henry & Associates, Incorporated. In the materials given to you as you entered the meeting, you will find a copy of the agenda and the rules of conduct by which we will conduct this meeting. In the official part, we need to elect 10 directors to serve for the next year, and there are four other items of official business. Then we will have our annual presentations and a time at the end for questions and answers. Before proceeding to the business meeting, I would like to make certain introductions. I first present the board of directors.
Please stand when I read your name. Matthew C. Flanagan, Thomas H. Wilson Jr., Thomas A. Wimsett, Shruti S. Miyashiro, Wesley A. Brown, Curtis A. Campbell, Tammy S. LoCascio, Lisa M. Nelson, Gregory R. Adelson, and me, David B. Foss. Each director is in attendance at this meeting. Each director is a candidate for re-election at this meeting. Thank you. In attendance are the following officers of the company: Gregory Adelson, Chief Executive Officer and President, Mimi Carsley, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Shanon McLachlan, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Craig Morgan, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary, Renee Swearingen, Senior Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer and an Assistant Treasurer, and Mary Stluka, Assistant Corporate Secretary. Thank you. Also in attendance today are representatives of our independent registered accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Caroline Gagliardi, lead partner, Dan Zorn, partner, and Mildred Bermeo, director.
They will be available to answer any proper questions you may have during the question and answer portion of the meeting. Thank you. Thomas Cooper, representative of Computershare, our transfer agent, is in attendance to assist in tabulation of proxies and ballots and will act as inspector of election. Mr. Cooper has delivered his oath of office to the company. I will also add that the minutes of last year's annual meeting are available, and any stockholder wishing to inspect the meetings should contact our Assistant Corporate Secretary, Mary Stluka, at mstluka, M-S-T-L-U-K-A, at jackhenry.com. Thomas Cooper, inspector of election, will now report on the mailing of the notice of this meeting and the presence of a quorum.
This meeting is held pursuant to printed notice mailed with a proxy statement on or about October 3rd, 2025, to each stockholder of record as of the close of business on September 16th, 2025, who is entitled to vote. A list of stockholders entitled to vote at this meeting has been available at the company's headquarters for the past 10 days and is available here today. All documents concerning the call and notice of the meeting will be filed with records of the meeting. The count of shares present immediately prior to the commencement of this meeting indicates that a quorum with respect to each voting issue is present in person or by proxy.
I hereby declare a quorum present at the meeting. On behalf of the board of directors, I would like to express my appreciation to all stockholders who returned their proxies. The formal business of the meeting will now proceed. Those stockholders who have returned their proxy and do not wish to change their vote need not vote as your proxy has been counted. Stockholders who did not return a proxy or who wish to change your vote, please go to the registration desk now and mark your ballots as we will declare the polls to be closed and voting will conclude upon completion of the following review of items to be voted upon. Okay, the first item of business is the election of 10 directors to serve until the 2026 annual meeting of stockholders or until their successors are duly elected and qualified.
As indicated in the company's proxy statement and notice of this meeting, the board of directors has nominated the following 10 persons whom I presented earlier. There is no need to stand when your name is read: Matthew C. Flanagan, Thomas H. Wilson Jr., Thomas A. Wimsett, Shruti S. Miyashiro, Wesley A. Brown, Curtis A. Campbell, Tammy S. LoCascio, Lisa M. Nelson, Gregory R. Adelson, David B. Foss. Mr. Morgan, Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary, has informed me that there were no stockholder nominations for this meeting timely filed with the secretary prior to this meeting. We received one stockholder proposal which will be considered if properly presented. The next item of business will be to approve on an advisory basis the compensation of our named executive officers. This vote is commonly referred to as the say-on-pay vote.
Specifically, the board of directors has recommended that you vote on an advisory basis to approve the following resolution: Resolve that the compensation paid to the named executives as disclosed in the company's proxy statement for the 2025 annual meeting of stockholders pursuant to the compensation disclosure rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the compensation discussion analysis, the compensation tables, and related narrative disclosure, is hereby approved. For your information, the named executives for fiscal year 2025 were David Foss, Executive Board Chair; Greg Adelson, President and Chief Executive Officer; Mimi Carsley, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer; Craig Morgan, General Counsel and Secretary; and Shanon McLachlan, Chief Operating Officer. The next item of business will be a vote on the approval of the company's 2025 Equity Incentive Plan. Our board has recommended that you vote for the approval of the 2025 Equity Incentive Plan.
The next item of business will be to vote on ratification of the selection of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending June 30th, 2026. Our board has recommended that you vote for the ratification. The next item of business is a stockholder proposal titled Improved Shareholder Ability to Call for a Special Shareholder Meeting submitted by Mr. Chevedden. I will now recognize Mr. Chevedden's representative, Ms. Connie Wickham, to introduce the proposal and who will have up to three minutes to present the proposal in accordance with the rules of conduct. Right here, Connie.
Proposal 5, Improved Shareholder Ability to Call for a Special Shareholder Meeting sponsored by John Chevedden. Shareholders ask that the board of directors take the steps necessary to amend the governing documents to give the owners of a combined 10% of the outstanding common stock the power to call a special shareholder meeting. A shareholder right to call for a special shareholder meeting, as called for in this proposal, can help make shareholders' engagement meaningful. A shareholder's right to call for a special shareholder meeting will help ensure that the Jack Henry Board and management engages with the shareholders in good faith because shareholders will have a viable plan B alternative by calling for a special shareholder meeting. To guard against the Jack Henry Board of Directors becoming complacent, shareholders need the ability to call a special shareholder meeting to help the board adopt new strategies when the needs arise.
Jack Henry stock has been in a long-term slump. In 2020, the stock price was at $200, and now it is at $160. There is no concern that allowing 10% of the shares to call for a special shareholder meeting is too easy. It is almost unheard of for any special shareholder meeting called by shareholders to ever occur at any company, even though a significant number of companies allow 10% of shareholders to call for a special shareholder meeting. The reason to have this right is that with the right in place, companies are more likely to engage productively with their shareholders because shareholders have an alternative ability to call for a special shareholder meeting. Please vote yes, improved shareholder ability to call for a special shareholder meeting Proposal 5.
Thank you, Ms. Wickham. For the reasons stated in the proxy statement, the board has considered this proposal and recommends a vote against the proposal. Stockholders voting in person, please mark your ballots and take them to the registration desk now. All proposals are formally before the meeting. We will pause briefly to allow voting to conclude. I hereby declare the polls to be closed. The inspector of election will now report the tabulation results of all balloting for the election of directors and the other matters presented to the stockholders.
Voting results have been tabulated, and each of the 10 nominees for director has been elected by a majority of the votes cast. The compensation of named executive officers has been approved by a majority of the votes cast. The 2025 Equity Incentive Plan has been approved by a majority of the votes cast. The ratification of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm has been approved by a majority of the votes cast. The stockholder proposal titled Improved Shareholder Ability to Call for a Special Shareholder Meeting was not approved by a majority of the votes cast.
The final vote tally will be disclosed on a Form 8-K that we will file with the SEC. This concludes the official business of the meeting. I declare this 48th Annual Meeting of Stockholders is adjourned. And now it is time for the informal part of our annual meeting with the presentations from your CEO, Greg, and CFO, Mimi. Greg.
Thank you, Dave. So first of all, I'd like to welcome all of you here in Monett for coming to attend in person, so thank you all for doing so. I also want to acknowledge that yesterday was Veterans Day, so I'm not sure if we have any veterans here in the audience or abroad, but do want to welcome you and thank you for your service and again for what you've done for our country. I'm going to cover just a few things pretty quickly, and then Mimi will come up and give some updates related to the financial performance over the last year. As we do at this company, we always remember Jack and Jerry and where we started.
And so this company, as we know, has been around now for 49 years, so next year obviously will be our 50th, and we got some exciting things planned. But for 49 years, we've been following the mantra that Jack and Jerry started to make sure that we strengthen connections between what we do for financial institutions and what they do for the communities that they serve. And that's something that has been a big focus of our company ever since I took over as well, and we're continuing to address that each and every day. But as it says here, lots of things change. There's a lot of evolution in our space right now, but three things that don't change are doing the right thing, doing whatever it takes, and having fun.
Those are all things that Jack and Jerry instilled in this company and we continue to do today. We also believe that there are five focus areas that we do differently and better than our competition. And so kind of highlighted here is our people-first culture. If you've heard David previous to me and others previous to him, that this is a people-first culture. We believe if we take care of our associates, they're going to take care of our clients, and ultimately our clients are happy and thus our shareholders are happy. We do that through a variety of things, so technology innovation is one of those. We believe that we are leading the industry right now in innovation, and we have a whole host of things that I'll share with you where we're doing that. We've always had industry-leading customer service.
That continues today and has been validated by a lot of outside studies and groups that study customer service in our industry. We also believe that we have a very transparent strategy that we share with our clients, with our shareholders, with our associates, and we believe that we're executing on that strategy better than anybody in the industry. So you'll see kind of a moniker at the bottom of a lot of our decks, including this one here coming up, that says Culture, Service, Innovation, Strategy, and Execution, and we believe those five words truly differentiate us in the market. We also believe that we live by what we call the four tenets, and a lot of that starts with the first one, transparency.
So we believe having a very transparent nature of how we communicate with our associates, how we communicate with our clients and our shareholders, again, is unique in the space. And there's a whole host of things that I could go through that we do to ensure that that happens and that we live this every day, but that is a big part of how we value our transparency. We also build a lot of consistency at the company, so you've heard over the last several years or have read about a One Jack Henry program that we started in 2019 that still lives today. A lot of the consistency we've built is to ensure that we look and operate like one company, again, to our associates and to our clients, and consistency is a big part of that. The ability to collaborate as a company, we're now 7,200 strong.
We have a lot of very innovative thinkers at the company and come from diverse backgrounds, and so we make sure that we're spending a lot of time in a variety of settings to collaborate the best that we can to, again, drive that innovation. And then ultimately, it's about communication. The more that we're talking to our associates, the more we're talking to our clients and our shareholders, the better they understand our vision and our strategy and the better that we're able to execute. So speaking of strategic direction, I won't go through this whole slide, but I will kind of point to the middle section there where we have our strategy statement.
This is something that we created last November that we shared to try to have a single-page document for our associates and our clients to better understand the company's purpose, mission, and vision, but also kind of the strategy that is driving everything that we do. Each of the business units at the company has their own stuff that they're putting under the strategic imperatives and the organizational enablers, but they're following those six kind of categories of opportunity to look to on how they will drive the things that are important in their respective business units, but actually attain to the strategy statement that you see there.
So as I talked about our people-first culture, and one of the other things that I really wanted to spend a lot of time was. I mentioned this before, but I am the first CEO at this company that never met Jack and Jerry. And so I wanted to spend time making sure that I spent time with both Pat and Brenda. And so this is a picture of us. We did some renovations in this building. This is a picture of us doing a ribbon cutting upstairs. We've done some other things that we've involved them in and will continue to involve them in, to again, to have that connection to the past and the connection to this community as well.
So I mentioned earlier we're 7,200 associates strong now and growing, and so this has been a long journey of where we were 49 years ago to where we are today. But again, one thing that stays true is that we have an average tenure that is almost unheard of in our industry of over 10 years of average tenure at the company. And so I've been here almost 15 years, and in lots of cases, even just looking at the room of a lot of our associates here, I'm kind of the young one, not age-wise, but maybe associate-wise. Then our overall engagement score. We do surveys with our associates on a regular basis on their anniversary. I send out an anniversary note to every associate. They have a chance to fill out a survey literally on a daily, monthly basis based on their anniversary date.
We take a few of those categories and we monitor them, and we're very proud to say that the 81% overall engagement score is about 13 to 15 percentage points higher than what the industry benchmark is, and we continue to hit that mark on a regular basis. But you can see here, 88% believe in our values, 80% feel a sense of belonging, 85% feel that we demonstrate integrity across the organization. I mentioned industry-leading customer service. Here's a quick depiction of that. So today we have roughly 7,400 clients that buy at least one product from Jack Henry. So if you think about the industry today, it's roughly about 8,300 institutions that are still both banks and credit unions, but we have 7,400 of those buying at least one product from Jack Henry.
We have maintained a 99% core client retention rate, meaning that if a customer was not acquired by another institution, they rarely ever leave Jack Henry, and this is in the history of our company, and we continue to far exceed anybody in the industry on that front. As a byproduct of that, 55% of our core clients, these would be on our core products of Symitar, SilverLake 20/20, and Bank Director, which are our core products, but 55% of our core clients have been with us over 20 years. Again, in an industry that doesn't see that, especially from our competition, it's a really rare number. The number of Banno users, which is our digital offering that we started in 2018 from the ground up, fastest growing digital product in the market. We've gone from basically zero to 14.3 million at the end of our fiscal year.
We're actually at 14.7 million as of today, but then from a customer service standpoint, we send out surveys based on cases that come in, and our customers have a chance to complete that, and as you can see, a three meets expectations. A five is extremely satisfied, so for us to average an overall score of 4.61, you got to get a lot of fives to make that happen, so we're very proud of our customer service team, and I see Tammy's here, so big shout out to her and her team for what they do, but the reality is this is something that nobody in the industry does at the level that we do, and I will tell you that it's actually already gone up this year to a 4.63, so we're continuing to make progress in this area.
So we still have a sizable amount of market share in our space, both on the banking and the credit union. So I won't go through each of the individual segments, but I will point out that one of the strategies of Jack Henry over the last several years is to go what we call upmarket, go get larger institutions into our family. And so about five years ago, our average asset institution size was 700 million. We are now averaging 1.4. I said million, but I meant billion, sorry, 700 million. We're now averaging 1.4 billion in assets. So about a 35% growth that we've seen over the last five years as we've continued to win larger and larger clients.
So you can see we have a 24% market share now on the banking side of our business on the over $1 billion, but we have a 48% market share on the over $1 billion in the credit union side. And so again, we'll continue to focus on that strategy. I mentioned innovation as being a differentiator for us. So here's a few things that I'll highlight. So about three years ago, almost three and a half years ago now, Dave, when he was CEO, actually announced a tech modernization strategy that we were unveiling to modernize a lot of our technology and move it into the public cloud. And I'm proud to say that we've been executing on that strategy actually ahead of where we thought we were going to be.
There's a whole host of things that go into that strategy, not just core, but a bunch of our other products that we've done, but we continue to innovate in those levels, again, at a level greater than anybody else. As I have off to the right here, we are averaging about 14%-15% of our top line goes back into our products and infrastructure. If you look at our competition, that's about double what they are doing in the industry today, and again, we continue to operate that again, including this year. We're also continuing to innovate and operate in our existing foundational cores that I named earlier, and that will continue to happen as well. I mentioned Banno as a significant driver of opportunity for us.
We've continued to innovate and elevate that product in the market, specifically adding business applications that we did not have years prior, and that continues to, again, be a big opportunity for us to win. We created a new product in the fraud side called Financial Crimes Defender, and we built an entire platform on that that we've started to roll out and starting to get some nice results on as well. And we're just in the early stages of rolling out a new enterprise account opening platform that's tied to our lending solution. It's actually the very first solution in the space that has a single platform for both consumer and commercial loans on a single account opening platform. So we're pretty proud of what we've done there and, again, early stages.
We also announced very recently last year at our investor day, but we announced in most recent earnings call what we've been doing in our small, medium-sized business strategy, which we think is an opportunity for us to help protect the community banks and credit unions in the space to allow deposits to stay within those institutions instead of going out to other providers like Stripe and Square that are in the market doing that. We've just started to roll it out, but getting some really nice fanfare on that. And it is a big part of our long-term strategy here to continue to elevate and innovate what we do in our SMB space. A lot of things with AI going on in the market, and Jack Henry is at the forefront of looking at that.
We're doing a whole host of things inside the company to make ourselves more efficient, to build better products, things along that line. But we're also starting to test some things in our products as well. And so we have a couple of products that are with some of our clients that we're testing some of the AI capabilities. One of the things that we are pretty proud of is that we take what we call a responsibly bold and balanced approach to ensure that both our associates and our clients are protected, and we have guardrails around everything that we do, and that will continue to drive. I mentioned the One Jack Henry program, which is a huge opportunity and continues to be as a differentiator in the space to make a company that's an amalgamation of 50 acquisitions and 7,200 employees, associates, to look like one company.
And that's really hard to do, and there aren't many people in the space that have tried to attack that as hard as we have. Faster payments is something that is really around things that you may be familiar with like Zelle or Venmo or moving payments in a small business environment through what are called new rails. So the Fed has a new rail, and there's one through The Clearing House. And Jack Henry's been at the forefront of that for the last six or seven years, but we continue to drive and see huge opportunity in faster payments as well. And then lastly, and probably definitely not least, is our focus on compliance and cybersecurity.
When you're managing 7,400 clients and having opportunities, you're constantly looking for what the bad people are doing in the space and making sure that you're spending time and attention on all of our compliance and security. So real quick, some insights. For those of you that follow the space closely, the financial institution merger and acquisition market is significantly heating up and will continue to increase. We are already seeing numbers that we haven't seen in several years. But just as a reminder, this is an industry that's been consolidating for over 40 years, and we've seen this at Jack Henry basically since our inception, and we know how to manage through it, and we're continuing to manage very well through it. And we also see a lot of opportunity as well. The regulatory landscape remains very unclear.
Administration change that we had has kind of changed the dynamic of how some of the regulators have operated, specifically things like the CFPB, things along that line. But also there's some stuff that has come out with the GENIUS Act and the big beautiful bill and things along that that still have some regulatory uncertainty that we continue to monitor and continue to make sure that we're on top of. Stablecoin is a big issue and opportunity for companies like Jack Henry. So we are going headfirst in and working through ensuring that we are there to help our clients out by building out the right strategy to support that. We're also timing some of that initiative with what is going on with still a level of regulatory uncertainty in that particular market. We help sponsor several different surveys in the space.
One of them is a group called Bank Director, actually a survey that goes out to banks and credit unions, but it's managed by the Bank Director group. And one of the things that we're excited is it's continued to validate what we continue to believe are opportunities in the space for Jack Henry. One of the things that Jack Henry himself used to say is that our banks are not in business to make Jack Henry successful. We are in business to make them successful.
So we are constantly looking for ways to drive those opportunities for our banks and credit unions through efficiency gains, through building everything that we do today as digital, deposit growth, which is a huge challenge with various groups and entities trying to go in and take depositors and some of the younger age generations that really don't like to go into a bank or a bank branch. Fraud mitigation, I mentioned a product that we've rolled out, but fraud is huge. Really, everything that we do, we have to manage through that. I mentioned SMB and then embedded payments.
We acquired a company just on September the 30th called Victor Technologies, a small company that we were already doing some business with that is going to help us with this embedded payment strategy that will allow fintechs that are in the space to work with banks that have charters to drive additional types of transactions. Again, what we see is opportunity to drive a diverse revenue stream for both the bank or credit union and as well as Jack Henry. Lastly, there is a lot of macroeconomic uncertainty. We talk about higher interest rates. Actually, interest rates seem to be potentially dropping, and we had one in November and looks like potentially one in December. The geopolitical conflicts, there is a lot of that still going on, making sure that our banks and especially some of the banks that we represent represent people in those areas.
And then so it does create potential risks to some bank profitability. So we're continuing to help them work through that with driving the right approaches. And then I mentioned artificial intelligence and what we're doing here at the company, but it does create opportunities for our customers as well. And so we're trying to make sure that we build the solution sets either into our products or into our processes that they can replicate that will allow them to use those throughout their enterprise as well. So just to end, these are some of the highlights that we saw last year in fiscal year 2025. We did have record revenue and operating income. And thanks to Mimi, our CFO, and many of her staff, we really changed the improved metrics that we measure and monitor the business by. We had record sales bookings.
We continue to really drive a huge number of opportunities. We had 51 core wins last year, new competitive core takeaways in an industry that only sees roughly 100 or so deals per year. We won 51 of those, and 16 of those were multi-billion-dollar institutions. And again, that's a record for Jack Henry. I mentioned the technology modernization strategy and our execution, huge part of our differentiation and will continue to be as our competition looks to try to catch up to us. There was a big file format changing that I won't go into details here, but it was like the biggest change in the industry in about 25 years. And our team were very successful going through that and came out fairly unscathed. So very proud of the work that they did.
We've had a lot of transitions, not just me in the CEO role for the last 16 months, but several other folks that have stepped into new executive roles through retirement and things along that line. And it's hard to say anything is completely seamless, but it's been pretty darn seamless. And so very proud of what we've been able to do there. And then we did a lot on the AI side, as I mentioned before, and continuing to build efficiency in the company and making sure that we're doing the right thing for our shareholders by hiring at the right times and following a culture that we've embedded here at Jack Henry, which is doing more with the same and not doing more with less. And what that means is we're looking for ways to not lay people off.
We're looking for ways to drive more opportunity with the same people we have today. And we've been very successful with that over the last year. So with that, I'm going to pass it over to our CFO, Mimi Carsley. She's finishing her, I guess, your third year now with us. So welcome to the stage, Mimi.
Thank you, Greg. Good morning, everyone, and we really appreciate you being here with us today. So I'm going to start a little bit about FY 2025. So at this point, a lot of you have read our published reports, potentially have learned, listened to our earnings call, and know what a fantastic year it was for Jack Henry. So as we previously shared, we track and report five key financial performance metrics that we think ensure financial discipline, align operations to performance, and value generation and creation for you, our shareholders. So I'm going to talk a little bit about those five metrics here today. So the first is non-GAAP revenue growth. So we move out, we extract the deconversion, what happens in industry consolidation, so that non-GAAP is really an indicator of that organic, healthy part of the business that will be continuing year after year.
In FY 25, we had non-GAAP revenue growth of 6.5% led by our cloud digital card business. Very strong top-line revenue growth that allowed to flow through to operating income, which is our second metric. There we think about that profitability of revenue through accurate, attentive, disciplined expense control. We have more of that profit flowing through from the revenue we generate. Based on disciplined headcount growth this year, focus from management around investing for the future, but also being disciplined about expense control, we were able to generate over 70 basis points of additional profitability through our margin expansion in the year. The next metric we look a lot about and really focus, and this is a key differentiator for Jack Henry, which is return on invested capital.
So that measures how efficiently the company is using the capital given to us by our shareholders to generate future profits. Last year, we finished with return on invested capital of over 22%. It helped by the decline in our debt balance. We ended the year fantastically with zero debt on our balance sheet, a very strong financial position to be in. And so that led to the rebounding of return on invested capital. So very impressive on return on invested capital. If you look at other companies, it's really a standout metric for Jack Henry. The next metric we focus on a lot is free cash flow.
Of that revenue we generate, how much flows to the bottom line in terms of cash flow, allowing us to invest for future growth, allowing us to return capital to shareholders in the form of dividends or share buyback, allowing us to invest in our businesses for R&D and other operational needs. We ended the year with over $410 million in free cash flow and a free cash flow conversion rate of 90%, which was great to return back to that range of 80%-100%+. Now that we're on the other side of some of the tax legislation, we expect to be in this range going forward. Great to see a return back to that very high free cash flow conversion. The last metric I'll talk about is the GAAP earnings per share.
So I talked a little bit about non-GAAP revenue, but here at the end of the day, from a net income perspective, we focus on GAAP. We are a GAAP U.S. filer. We are a high-quality earnings story. And so we had GAAP earnings per share of $6.24, a growth of over 19% last year. So a great year in general. The five metrics consistency show across these metrics just the durable performance and the strong financial health of Jack Henry. So that was one year. If we take a little bit of a longer span lens, we think about that strong performance in FY 25 is not an isolated event. It's a representation of the consistency and durability of our business model.
These were just a couple of those metrics I just talked about previously, but looking at them a little bit longer on a three-year basis. As a company, as a management team, as a board, it is our goal to deliver consistently strong and compounding improved performance every year. These two metrics, as we look at the three-year performance, we have continued to deliver strong revenue growth and profitability. Let's talk a little bit about our revenue and how we operate and track that internally. We report financial results for three operating segments plus a corporate and other bucket, which is kind of a catchall, if you will. In FY 25, all three financial segments were independently strong and contributed to our positive results.
So not only do we benefit from having three operating segments of different business models, but our business model itself is very diverse with a diverse customer base and different revenue models of how we collect revenue. So we have the core business that's the growth that there has been driving on long-term trends of moving from on-premise operations to cloud-based private cloud, Jack Henry's private cloud, and eventually the public cloud. From a processing perspective, we've had strong sales success for a lot of new wins of new accounts coming to Jack Henry, the organic growth of our banks and credit union customers, and the innovative Jack Henry platform offerings.
So our second segment, the payment segment, there you see card processing, you see our enterprise payments business, our revitalized bill payment business, and as Greg mentioned earlier, the exciting new faster payments business and the embedded payment space, which is really heating up, which is exciting for future growth. The last segment is our complementary segment. And the way I describe that is if it's not core and it's not payment, it's complementary. It's kind of all the other suite of products and services we do that help support a bank or credit union in their day-to-day functionality. So headline, there's a lot of products and solutions within that portfolio, but headlined by Banno and our digital solutions like treasury account opening, our fraud tool solutions are in that. So just a healthy, robust portfolio of products in the complementary segments.
So as Greg mentioned on the market share slide, we serve over 900 banks and over 700 credit unions with our core foundational products. And then we serve another over 5,800 non-core customers with that diverse products of payments and complementary that I just mentioned. So no dependency, no outsized performance on any one customer, which is great from a resiliency perspective. And that diversity of portfolio products, we earn a high recurring revenue based on different ways we bill. So per account holder, per member, per transaction, per active user. Plus there's some one-time revenue streams like hardware or consulting. So diversity within the ways we bill as well, which builds to the durability and resiliency of our model. So with that, I'll just call out that none of these billing structures are dependent on the number of employees at our clients.
They are aligned with our clients, so helping them fight fraud or helping them deliver value or service excellence. So engaging, offering service, trust, relationship to their end customers. So as I mentioned at the start, those five key metrics, the last one was GAAP EPS. So I wanted to just show you a little bit of a longer trend about that high-quality earnings stream of earnings that we've been delivering. So from our start in 1986, where we were $0.03 earnings per share to this past year where we delivered over $6.24, Jack Henry has a long history of delivering on shareholder value with earnings per share growth. So we are committed to generating increasing earnings per share, starting with organic revenue and growth flowing from the top line revenue all the way through bottom line profitability.
As responsible stewards of your capital, we invest in making sure growth for the company, whether that's product innovation, whether that's security, whether that's enterprise infrastructure to generate future growth and sustained outsized returns. Our strong free cash flow enables us to invest for tomorrow while returning capital to our shareholders. We're committed to being responsible stewards of investor capital. This past year, as a dynamic capital allocator, we've ended the year again with zero debt, which we're super excited about. We paid over $165 million in dividends to our shareholders, and we bought back over $35 million worth of shares. Investing today and for the future. Let's talk about the future a little bit. We're very proud of our FY 25 results, and they signaled another year of consistency.
But as we look forward, and we just had our earnings call just about a week ago, we're excited about the start of FY 2026. The momentum and outlook we have for a strong 2026. We had impressive Q1, the first quarter financial performance, and raised our targets for several of our key guidance metrics. We continue to see robust demand for our solutions, strong interest from our prospects, satisfaction, high marks from existing customers, and validation for emerging opportunities. There's still a lot of the year left to play out. We've only cleared through first quarter, but we remain upbeat and confident in our ability to generate sustained shareholder value. So as always, we appreciate the contributions of our dedicated associates. A big shout out. I have a lot of finance team members here, so thank you for everything you do.
But the whole team, and it is a collaborative team. We live by those tenets that achieves these superior results for you, our investors. So thank you for your ongoing confidence and support.
And then. So I don't know if you all have any questions. We can take any if you do. If not, we will get lunch going. Yes. Hold on just a second.
Thank you, sir. Kim Harrell, long-time happy stockholder. I want to preface this. This is not a political question. It's an economic one. But to what positive, negative, or indifference have the tariffs had upon our company?
You want to take it or you want me? You want to take it. Okay. So for our company, very little. Now, there are some things that we purchase that some of our vendors have come back and potentially raised some prices, but very minimal.
For the banks and credit unions, at least from what we've heard, depending on where they are located, again, could be very little. Most of it has to do with their customers versus less about the bank itself. So the short answer to the question is a very small amount. Anything you want to add? Yes.
I wanted to take this time to thank all of you. I am a Monett native. I have owned Jack Henry stock since the day it went public. And I support all of Monett. I was in business for 33 years here. And I knew Jerry and Jack very well and the early people. And if you drive around Monett, you will see where Jack Henry & Associates have donated things to make this city beautiful. And Pat still donates. She donated a playground or something.
And I want to thank you all for not leaving Monett and supporting us as a business. And that's basically what I want to say. I would be so hurt if you ever left Monett because I compare Jack Henry to Monett. And I would like for you guys to drive around and see things that your company has done for this town. And I can't personally thank you enough.
Well, thank you for saying that. We appreciate that. And we do try to do as much as we can when we're here. So we do, even as a board, we do various things like during the holidays, go through the Christmas lights and the various things. And we do know that there's a lot of things that both Pat and Brenda and the families have donated and Jack Henry has contributed to as well.
But thank you for saying that.
And on the other hand, we thank the city, right? It's a partnership from the airfield to the town to thinking about hotel capacity for when we have our clients come in. It's really been a wonderful collaboration and heartwarming. We do a lot with the local high school students through our CAPS program. Volunteering, we did a leadership team at Camp Barnabas this past summer. So thank you. It's been a great partnership.
Yeah. Very good.
Thank you.
Sure. Yes.
Okay. This will be a difficult question, but I want to know why Jack Henry stock is down 8%-10% since three years ago.
I can start on some of that.
I'll add in.
Add in. So as a leadership team, we obviously watch the stock, but what we focus on is the things we can control.
And so how do we drive profitability? How do we drive demand for our solutions? How do we drive more market share? How do we continue to invest for the future for growth? Unfortunately, things outside of our control, sometimes when there's nervousness about the health of banks, impacts our stock. Sometimes, right now, for example, people are concerned about the impact of AI instead of seeing the benefits that AI could bring to us. So sometimes, as a sector, we're out of favor. Sometimes we have a pretty high multiple from a premium because of the reliability, because of the durability, because of the high-quality earnings. We've earned a higher multiple. So sometimes it is just relative to the market as a whole and less about what Jack Henry is doing.
But it's something we know we're focused on, we are all in on, is driving that shareholder value through stock appreciation.
Yeah. And the only thing I'll add is that we are aligned with our shareholders on both from a revenue growth and from a margin expansion. And those are two things that we believe if we continue to do what we've been doing and maybe even continue to inch up with some of the innovation that I talked about, then that's where you're going to start to see some significant separation.
But the market itself and the belief of things, one of the things that we've spent a lot of time over the last several years is convincing the market that we're not the same company that we were years ago, and we shouldn't be compared to some of the others in the industry at the same level as well. But we get kind of pushed down sometimes when there's various things that are happening in the industry, specifically to competition or just the sector itself, that we get kind of thrown in with the bathwater. And so we are doing as good a job as we think that we can to try to continue to drive that level of differentiation. And we believe that the things that we were doing are going to continue to drive that stock price up. Any other questions other than Jack Henry & Associates? Okay.
I think the lunch is probably already set up, but I know the team has prepared a really nice lunch again. But again, I do want to thank all of you for being here. We appreciate your support as shareholders. We appreciate your support in the community. And again, thank you for being here. So that's it.