So obviously you'll have a lot of perspective to add to the conversation, but I'm sure you've noticed, or maybe you haven't, but we've certainly noticed that over the past year in software there's been this renewed interest and appreciation for vertical-focused software.
Mm-hmm.
Right? We went through a period where horizontal software was very top of mind, and the idea was, you know, just, the growth, the growth characteristics of those businesses captured a lot of attention. You've just been methodically doing what you're doing for a long time, and maybe we can just start by speaking to what Tyler does and what has kind of enabled that consistent profile that investors have come to appreciate again.
Yeah, it's funny because in 1997 when I joined the company and we sort of embarked on this strategy of providing software to local governments and now broader levels of government, we were a vertical software company, but that wasn't a term then. So there wasn't really a name for us. We were kind of a government software company, and so we're happy that at some point there became a name for what we do, and we are a vertical software company focused exclusively on the public sector. We are very broad in terms of the products we offer to the public sector. We have by far the broadest product offering in the space and broad in terms of the levels of government we serve.
We sort of grew up in the local government level: cities, counties, school districts, have significantly broadened our position with state governments, mostly through the acquisition of NIC three years ago, and have a small presence at the federal government. About 5% of our revenues also came through an acquisition, but both state and federal are areas where we look to continue to grow. It's a big vertical market, obviously, the public sector, but it's interesting that it's such a fragmented market. It's historically served by lots of niche players who usually focus on a narrow product area and often narrow geographically. So like a company that just does court systems in California or tax systems in New York or New Jersey. So, we're really unique in terms of the breadth of product offering, the size of our customer base.
There's really not a close number two behind us. We have lots of competition and different competition in every product area. So not to say that we have a monopoly or anything, but there's not another, you know, full vertical public sector software company that's anywhere near our size.
When we just think about the breadth, like how much of an advantage is that versus the fragmented players that are trying to do one thing? Is there an association with Tyler more broadly across public sector that helps, or what has enabled your business model to succeed versus?
Yeah, there's a number of factors around that. I think at one level the products work together, so some of these areas are very adjacent, so if you think about our major product categories: ERP, financials, public admin, payroll, human resources are our biggest single product set, about 30% of our revenues. Within that suite of products though, and what distinguishes us from the horizontal players like a Workday or an Infor is that we have dozens of applications integrated there that are government-specific: a licensing and permitting system, a utility billing system, parks and recreation, even a cemetery management system. Those are things that the horizontal companies don't have, but the government still needs, and so the ability to have all of those in one integrated solution, from one vendor is something that a lot of governments find value in.
Then adjacent areas. We do. We're the leading provider of court systems, systems that manage all the aspects of a criminal or civil case, prosecutor, probation, jury, jails, all of those things. Then we also are a major player in the public safety area. We do 911 systems, computer dispatch, police record systems. Those are two completely different competitor sets in those two areas, even though they're very adjacent. We're the only company that can offer an integrated solution where all of the information flows through all those things seamlessly. We provide extra value from having those versus those individual point solutions, from being able to integrate the solutions, from having common foundational elements like one security and sign-on, one payment engine, one workflow engine across all those.
And then a layer of data and analytics capabilities that sit on top of those that add value as well.
Can you just talk about the TAM and the penetration rates within the industry? Because I think sometimes investors think, "Well, gosh, Tyler's been around a long time. You know, I wonder if they're starting to run into some level of penetration," but you're not from the stats that we've seen. So just maybe for those who don't have appreciation for how vast, like, all these different categories end up being, provide some.
Yeah. As I said, it is very fragmented. Part of it because it's a really slow-moving market and it turns over very slowly. So, we think that if you looked at all the systems that all the governments out there are using today, that, you know, 60% or more of those are legacy systems. They're either homegrown systems, some of those 40 and 50 years old COBOL systems, or systems from vendors who aren't competitive today, not necessarily out of business, but, at some point didn't invest in a next generation of technology. So they have products that are widely installed and used, but that nobody would buy today.
And so as those systems age and finally get to the point where a government says, "This is at end of life," and for a government that's very different than the private sector, that's often 20 years of a cycle and sometimes longer, then it's not an opportunity for the existing vendor to replace it, but it's a new opportunity. So even in some of our big areas, you know, like ERP, where we have thousands of customers, we still have probably a mid-teens kind of a market share. Our win rates are very different. Our win rates for our core products are typically north of 50%. So as these turn over slowly, we're winning kind of way more than our share, because of our strong competitive position. Courts and justice is probably our biggest, or market share. We have about 55% of the U.S. court systems.
But the ancillary products around that, like jails and jury and prosecutor, we have much smaller market shares 'cause we're newer in those areas. So huge cross-sell opportunity, and still plenty of runway ahead of us, just in the U.S.
So can we bring cloud into the conversation, and talk about the progress that you've made there? Tyler has embarked on the cloud transformation. It seems like it's catching some good momentum. We've seen signs that the margins have troughed and are starting to build back. But maybe walk through the past couple of years, like what the sort of impetus was for moving towards cloud and just how you've seen receptivity, given you mentioned customers can be slow-moving. So maybe it takes some time for that momentum to build. But what has the progress started to look like there?
Yeah. Our cloud transition, like a lot of things in government, has been slow and gradual. Government's typically not the first to want to embrace anything, anything new. And cloud is not new anymore, but so we for many years originally we were long ago just a traditional license and maintenance model. Then for a long time we offered a hybrid model that we either offered traditional license and maintenance on-prem deployments or a cloud deployment, which was really kind of a private cloud, a hosted solution, paid for with a subscription, but hosted typically at one of two Tyler data centers. And so we offered this hybrid model and let customers decide which one they wanted. And we didn't really try to push them one way or another.
And so very gradually for a long time, like 15 years, more and more of our business came in the cloud. In 2019 that really kind of changed and we said, you know, we're not cloud agnostic anymore. We're cloud first, clearly. This is where the future is. Not only it's better for Tyler, but it's better for our customers as well. 2019 was also the first year that 50% of our new business chose cloud. And so we changed our focus, changed things like sales commission structures, entered and increasingly started to move towards offering, no longer offering products in a license model, entered into an agreement with AWS so that we could get out of the data center business, which we couldn't scale, and moved to the public cloud and just renewed that agreement this year after five years.
we started moving our clients out of our data centers and putting all of our new clients in AWS. And so, since 2019, the pace of the transition has really accelerated. Today, last quarter, 97% of our new business is cloud. We're only selling a couple of products that still are offered licenses, and those are rapidly changing as well. We went through the margin and revenue pressures. So those licenses went away and took us time to build up the recurring stream. 2020, as you said, last year was kind of the trough of that, and really a really important inflection point. So, in 2023, our SaaS revenues now exceed our license and maintenance revenues. It was the trough in terms of margins, and so now we're on a margin expansion trajectory.
We had an investor day and talked about targets of going from a 23% operating margin in 2023 to a 30% plus margin in 2030. We're well on that path. The midpoint of our guidance this year implies about 150 basis points improvement in operating margins. Cash flow margins also seeing similar kinds of improvement. Really kind of on the other side of it, the market has gone from resisting to starting to be interested to really now embracing the cloud. There's a lot of reasons for that, especially around the struggles that governments have with running their own infrastructure, with hiring and keeping and replacing retiring systems administrators and security people. Cybersecurity concerns, ransomware attacks also increasingly making them more comfortable with systems in an AWS environment than in their own networks.
We've talked about the sort of slow-moving characteristic as one side of the customer profile, but the other side is they can't go out of business, they can't go anywhere, they have to find budget. Like these things have to happen at some point.
Yeah.
So what are you able to say around visibility into where the market is going, where the opportunities are in the next one, two, three years out, and how that just informs whatever you're doing from a prioritization standpoint and spend as CFO?
Yeah, yeah, we have a pretty highly visible model. We're now about 85% recurring revenues, either from maintenance or SaaS or from transaction-based revenues. Again, with these long sales cycles, our pipelines are highly visible as well. We've talked pretty consistently over the last several quarters about it being a very active market. RFPs, sales demos, all those metrics at very high levels from a historical perspective. With typical sales cycles of 12 to 18 months that you know points to you know better visibility over growth further down the road as things get executed and then get implemented and we start to recognize revenues. And even we're starting to see that impact in increased bookings and you know SaaS revenue growth north of 20% from that market over the last few quarters.
So, pretty good visibility, about good confidence in our, in the targets we've put out there. We've talked about accelerating revenue growth, although for us there's never explosive growth. These are, these things turn over slowly. So for us on the, you know, overall side, it's the kind of high single, low double digits, transactions being a little bit faster growing. Right now the SaaS revenue growth is significantly higher because as we transition our on-premises customers to the cloud, there's a pretty significant uplift in the revenues from those same customers.
Your customers kind of awareness of that TCO discussion, the discussion around reasons that cloud might come in more than the maintenance revenue stream, but you're enabling so much more. Is that something that you're finding most of the entities that you serve now just better?
Yeah. They understand that even though the change from maintenance to SaaS averages for us about a 1.7, 1.8 times uplift. For a new customer, it's about a 2X uplift. They understand that, and we help them understand that their costs don't increase that. But it's generally cost neutral or sometimes cost beneficial to them to make that move because they have hardware they don't have to pay for and replace. They have maintenance. They have jobs, often jobs that they're having trouble filling, so they've got budget for, but can't find the people or afford to hire them, or attract them to go to work for the county government. So those costs go away. And so they understand that trade-off and are open to it.
One question that we get from investors who are just coming up to speed on Tyler is just, is there any sort of macro-related exposure to think about? I think investors hear government and think, "Well, maybe there's something tied to election cycles or tied to something that might, potentially impact the business." But you're broadly diversified and I think you've sort of highlighted that. But in your assessment and amount of time as part of Tyler, have you noticed any macro-sensitivities at all?
Not much. Yeah, we're not insulated from everything, but from a lot of things. We're 98% domestic. So there's not a lot of geopolitical implications. Tariffs. A lot of talk about tariffs don't affect us. We, at the core, everything we provide is really essential to government. It's automating essential functions like public safety and courts and property taxes and licensing and payroll. So those aren't the kinds of things that you would expect to see cut even if there is a move towards government efficiency. We view that as something really positive for Tyler because generally the way governments are gonna be more efficient is by implementing new technology to replace old systems that support manual, highly manual, highly labor-intensive processes. So, you know, at the core, the things we do or help our customers do are really all essential functions.
We're, and we've seen that in prior economic slowdowns, really not much impact maybe on the timing of new business, but the demand, the drivers of the demand, the old system dying doesn't really change, and it's a pretty non-discretionary decision to replace it. There is an increasingly more of a push towards digital modernization. I think some of that has come post-COVID where governments have said, you know, this system, it'll work for maybe another five or ten years, but it doesn't support hybrid work. It only works if the clerk can come to their desk at the courthouse and sit in front of a terminal, and now people want to have hybrid or remote work, and government hasn't been very good about adapting to that, you know, providing citizen self-service so that people don't have to go down to the DMV to do something.
Those kinds of things are becoming more and more important and maybe accelerating the pace of some of these replacements. But, you know, I've with respect to elections, I've been at Tyler for 27 years. I'm pretty sure that during that whole time we have never mentioned elections on an earnings call or in an MD&A as a factor, either positive or negative. It just doesn't really affect the business. One might think it would, but it doesn't.
Yeah. No, that's, I think it's helpful. Can we spend a little bit of time talking about the M&A strategy, how that, I mean, you mentioned market is fragmented. I'm sure you pick up little points of opportunity just in your expertise within the public sector. So, what informs the, the M&A strategy prioritization efforts there?
Yeah. Our CEO, Lynn Moore, likes to say M&A is in our DNA. We've done roughly 60 acquisitions over the time I've been at Tyler, which sounds like a lot, but it averages a couple a year. This year there have been none. Last year there were four. A lot of these are smaller kind of tuck-in acquisitions that add a product, fill in a gap. Often it's around a core product in an existing suite of products. So, for example, where we have this leading position in the court case management software space, we bought a SaaS company that just does probation software. We bought a SaaS company that just does jury software that had really great systems and expertise, but were very narrow and small companies that had trouble scaling.
And then we can leverage our sales organization, put more products in the same sales reps bag, sell it back into our installed base and grow those things much faster than Tyler's core growth rate. We've done some acquisitions that filled in bigger gaps that added whole new sort of sub-verticals. So public safety several years ago was probably the biggest functional area of government that we didn't have an application in. And we acquired that through an acquisition of New World Systems. And then, in 2021, the biggest acquisition we've ever done was NIC, which was a public company, focused on the state government level and really focused on payments and transactions.
That brought us the capabilities and the platform for payments and these broad state relationships to enable us to sell Tyler software products to state governments where we didn't have relationships or a sales organization. We'll continue to do those tuck-in kinds of things. The tuck-ins maybe get a little bit bigger. There's still a lot of gaps around our products or things that we can fill in. Three of the acquisitions we did last year added AI capabilities, which were interesting. I'd say we've talked about our focus over the last couple of years has really been paying down the acquisition debt from the NIC acquisition. We paid off all of our term debt earlier this year, two years ahead of the term of the debt. The balance sheet's in a great place.
We generate a lot of cash. Today, the only debt on the balance sheet is a convertible that's due in 2026 and it's at 0.25% interest. It is in the money, but it's not terribly diluted. We have about $700 million in cash. We've got a $700 million undrawn revolver, which Wells Fargo leads, and we generate a lot of cash. So we're in a good position in terms of bigger M&A, but in the short term, we have a lot of really important initiatives around the cloud, the cloud transition, around the growth of our payments business, around cross-sell initiatives. So I'd say probably in the next year we're not really looking for a multi-billion dollar acquisition, but there will be those on the horizon.
Is that more the reason that you said there have been zero over the past year, but maybe four the year before? Is it more just suggestion of prior acquisitions and the things that you're working on, or was some of it at all tied to the interest rate environment?
Yeah, more around the interest rate environment and paying down the debt this year, and having accomplished that, also, yeah, it's more around all these initiatives and management attention that we're pretty picky right now. There's some things that we're always talking to a lot of people, and there also haven't been a lot of processes run. It from a lot of what we hear, there seemed to be an outlook for more activity next year. I would say that we're more successful despite all the efforts of the investment bankers. We're more successful with acquisitions when we initiate a process; we find someone, it might be a partner of ours, rather than participating in a process. But we've done both.
Yeah, that makes sense. How would you gauge progress with NIC thus far? And if there's an evolution of that progress, like the lessons learned, you know, how you would view the synergies and cross-sell potential there currently versus what it looked like when you first made the acquisition?
Yeah. So when we bought NIC, which was 2021, kind of in the middle of COVID, we approached them in mid-2020, about our thoughts that they'd make a good acquisition candidate for us. You know, there were a couple strategic opportunities we thought around it. One, it was a good business on its own, in the public sector, but very complementary to Tyler in that they were the backend software mostly at the local level. They're mostly the digital front end to government, mostly at the state level. So, different revenue model really all funded by transactions. So kind of self-funding model where they build, or provide interfaces to systems at the state level, a lot of which are not Tyler systems, big old mainframe systems, for the DMV, for example, for your motor vehicle registration or hunting and fishing licenses.
And so, providing access to those, running the state website and facilitating transactions with citizens or businesses and then getting paid with convenience fees or service fees on top of that and processing all of those payment transactions. We, Tyler, had a desire to expand its payments business because we have a lot of software products mostly used at the local level that facilitate payments that present bills, utility billing, traffic courts, licensing and permitting, property taxes, all those sorts of things. But we weren't a payment processor. And we had approached the market for a long time with partnerships, bringing in third-party payment partners that we might've had loose integrations with, but got a revenue share from their payment processing revenues. So, we wanted to keep more of that, be more involved and create a more integrated payment platform with our software products.
NIC brought us the technology and the expertise around that. We also thought we had a great opportunity with a lot of Tyler products that software products that had applicability at the state level, but we just didn't have a sales organization and didn't have those relationships. We thought we could leverage these very deep relationships and these very broad contracts that NIC has with 28 different states, to sell software into state governments. Both of those things have taken some time, but have proven to be true. We're increasingly seeing, both in terms of the pipeline and actual deals, a lot of successes in selling Tyler software into NIC states. A lot of, I'd say, certainly beyond what we expected.
We had a lot of use cases that we thought made sense, but a lot of things have emerged that weren't things we thought of before that had been opportunities. And in the payments, we're making a lot of progress there as well. We've reported, you know, the last few quarters as we've integrated that NIC platform with our Tyler software products, starting to figure out our go-to-market motion and, you know, how we compensate everybody and how we drive those sales. Last quarter we had 268 new deals for payments with Tyler software customers that add $8.5 million of new ARR. So that's been growing steadily, but we've just scratched the surface of it. We've got thousands of customers using Tyler software products that are payments opportunities.
Yeah. Why wouldn't that be a no-brainer for those customers given you mentioned you're already touching payments? And I think all of us have experienced places that we go, whether it's the DMV or somewhere else where you're surprised there's not a better payments portal or something like that. Is it also just tied to the slower moving nature of decision-making? Is it harder to go back and cross-sell something if a customer is already renewed? Or what are the things that?
Yeah. It should be a no-brainer. I mean, basically because our solution's a better solution than a generic horizontal payment solution. Because it's integrated with the software platform, it automates things like reconciliation. The same system that produced the bill, that produced the transaction is integrated with the payment platform. So it automates a manual process. It provides better reporting, better analytics. There's a whole lot of reasons why it's a better solution, and customers are willing to pay more for that, which is also good, so it's not a commoditized payment solution, and the good thing is often they can pay us more, but they can offset that by adding $1 or $2 convenience fee to your utility bill or to your traffic ticket or to whatever you're paying for.
So they can pay us more for a better solution, but not have a higher expense. It's really a matter of, you know, going back to our customers. Often we're either replacing an existing solution, which we may have to wait until their contract's up, or in some cases where we do enterprise-wide payments, we're replacing multiple payment providers where a city really doesn't have a strategy. They've got one payment provider for the parks and recreation department, a different one for the courts, a different one for the utilities. That's a little bit more complicated, but we've seen some good examples of that. One of them here in California last quarter. So it's a pretty compelling offering, we think. And so it's a matter of now pretty much all of our software deals, when we're responding to an RFP, they're not asking for payments.
They still get a proposal for payments and an explanation of why it's better to do that through us, but yeah, there's a huge runway and we're just right at the beginning of it.
I'd be remiss if I didn't spend a little bit of time on the targets. I think that the 2030 target model comes up often in investor conversations. Can you speak to the level of visibility you have that far into the future given you do have long customer lifetimes and what needs to happen for you to execute on both the growth and the margin side of those targets?
Yeah. At our investor day last year, we put out 2025 and 2030 targets. We thought it was an appropriate time. We've never done that before, gone out that far, but given the inflection point we were in the cloud transition, the opportunities ahead of us, the NIC acquisition a couple of years behind us, we thought it was important to make sure everybody was aligned with kind of where we thought things going and why, so we laid out revenue targets, cash flow targets, margin targets, and kind of what the factors were, how we get there. I'd say a year, year and a half into it, we're increasingly confident of those targets. In some cases we're ahead of plan. Not necessarily that that means we changed the ultimate target, but we're getting there a little faster.
And we've said all these things wouldn't be linear. But in terms of some of the underlying things like around the version consolidation of our products, the flips of our on-prem customers, the adoption of the payments, all those things are tracking at least in line with where we expected or ahead of plan. So cash flow certainly we'll finish this year well ahead of where our 2025 targets were. So, you know, pretty good visibility over that stuff. I think we tried to be realistic, but especially around the transaction business because we were, it was just at the beginning. I think that the 10%-13% growth targets we put out there were growing kind of high teens in the second half of this year. So those appear to be places where potentially there's an opportunity to outperform those over the longer term.
But yeah, there's a number of underlying factors. One of the biggest drivers of growth being just, you know, besides the transaction business, but the software growth being, you know, a couple ticks above where it's historically been is really around the cross-sell and upsell. So, with this customer base we've accumulated over decades and the breadth of our product offerings, there's a huge cross-sell and upsell opportunity, and we've done a lot of work structurally and internally to remove barriers and create incentives and make sure that we're aligned to go after those opportunities the best way we can, and starting to see more successes around that, not just between Tyler and the former NIC business, but really kind of all across Tyler.
and, you know, that will continue to be, you know, one of our biggest assets to leverage as we try to drive higher growth.
Okay. Is there a trade-off that we should think about at all if payments is outpacing overall growth on the margin side?
Yeah, there is because payments margins are not software margins. It's a great complementary business. It's great cash flow. It doesn't take away from the software business, but they're, they aren't the same margins, especially since most of our business is in a gross model. So, you know, we, we collect fees and then we pay out merchant fees and interchange fees. So the, the margin is lower. We have said that we expect that our payments margins will continue to improve mostly because our focus is on these value-added higher margin payments that are embedded with software as opposed to a, sort of a more commoditized, payment, sort of agreement.
And NIC had some of those historically when they were just more of a payments company, with lower margins and more pressure on those contracts and really not the same opportunity because of the ties to the software. So we expect those margins to improve. But if payments growth significantly outpaces the software growth, it can dilute our overall margins. We've said built into those margin expansion targets were an expectation that payments would grow somewhat faster, if they grow a lot faster than it would put more pressure on our overall margins, but certainly drive higher cash flow and bigger earnings.
Okay. I think time for just one more. So I'll leave it to you for closing thoughts. And we've talked that this is a very consistent business. I don't know how much your planning cycle shifts from year to year, but as we're coming into year end, if there are bigger areas of strategic focus, areas of investment prioritization, anything else that you would kind of highlight in helping frame the next one or three years for investors?
Yeah. Not a lot of changes, you know. We've got different focuses on investments. We're largely through a lot of the investment we've made around optimizing our products for the cloud. And we've released most of those cloud-efficient versions, which is having an impact on our margins positively. We have some AI investments. It's not like some of the big enterprise companies.
Can you expand on that? Just what AI?
Yeah. We've got some internal ones, so better uses of AI around things like implementations and professional services, data or data conversions around our support organization. None of these terribly surprising kind of cases, and some in our DevOps. But in terms of our products, investments in features and functionality using AI, they mostly involve automating processes. Governments do a lot of things that are routine processes, processing a license application, and all of those have a lot of manual intervention in them, and so there's a lot of opportunity there. We've been, without having unlimited budgets for all of that, prioritizing and saying, where can we have the most impact for our customers? How can we monetize it the best? And how can we leverage some of those investments across multiple Tyler products?
So we have some of those, you know, be more of it in the next year or two, but not like doubling our R&D budgets. A lot of it is reallocating things that we've been doing that we're largely through with, and then there's investments around continuing to improve our client satisfaction. So we have very low turnover. You know, our turn is 1%-2%. As you pointed out, our clients don't get acquired and they don't go out of business. So we have a benefit there. But generally we think our clients are pretty happy with us and we innovate a lot and we bring them better software every year. But in order to sell them more things and to sell them payments, they need to be really, really happy.
There are things that we're investing in around continuing to improve that client satisfaction, backend systems that we might not have used the same system across the whole company for support, for example. Getting all of that on one system. Investments in, you know, different aspects of creating a consistent, consistently good client experience across all of our products. To help further that, we have a search underway right now for a new C-level position, a Chief Client Officer, which is not a role that we've had company-wide in the past. That'll be hopefully in place around the beginning of the year, to oversee all of our support and professional services organizations. They'll continue to be investments around that.
Sounds like you've got plenty to keep busy with.
We do.
Brian, appreciate you making the trip to the West Coast. This is great.
You bet. Thank you.