Jack Henry & Associates Inc Q3 FY2020 Earnings Call

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Jack Henry & Associates Third Quarter FY 2020 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Kevin Williams, Chief Financial Officer. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.

Thanks, Stephanie. Good morning. Thank you for joining us for the Jack Henry & Associates third quarter fiscal 2020 earnings call. I’m Kevin Williams, CFO and Treasurer and on the call with me today is David Foss, our President and CEO. In just a minute, I will turn the call over to Dave to provide some of his thoughts about the state of our business and performance for the quarter and as well some comments about our response related to the impacts of COVID-19. After that, I’ll provide some additional thoughts and comments regarding the press release we put out yesterday after market closed and provide comments regarding the guidance for Q4 and full year FY20 provided in the release, and then we’ll open the lines up for questions and answers. First, I need to remind you this call includes certain forward-looking statements, including remarks or responses to questions concerning future expectations, events, objectives, strategies, trends or results. Like any statement about the future, these are subject to a number of factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those which we anticipate due to various risks and uncertainties. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise these statements. For a summary of these Risk Factors and additional information, please refer to yesterday’s press release and the sections in our 10-K entitled Risk Factors and forward-looking statements. On this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures including non-GAAP revenue and non-GAAP operating income. The reconciliation for historical non-GAAP financial measures can be found in yesterday’s press release. With that, I will now turn the call over to Dave.

Thank you, Kevin, and good morning everyone. Those of you who listen to our earnings calls on a regular basis may recall that I start every earnings call I’ve ever done by thanking our employees for their hard work and dedication to our customers and our company. At no time have I ever been more passionate about that point than I am today. Since the onset of this pandemic, the Jack Henry team has moved mountains to address the unprecedented needs of our customers while at the same time demonstrating true commitment to each other and our communities. To give you a sense of what that effort has included, here are just a few of the key initiatives completed by our teams since early March. Our crisis management team began conducting daily meetings at the beginning of March to provide an ongoing review of information and plans for every aspect of our business. They have been instrumental in our planning and success as the world around us has changed so significantly. Early in March, our human resources team enhanced our healthcare program to cover 100% of COVID-19 related medical treatment for all employees. We announced that we were operating in full-time work from home status on March 16 and our corporate technology services team successfully transitioned 96% of our employees by the end of that week. The other 4% are required in a Jack Henry location every day to manage one of our data center operations. Those employees began receiving bonuses immediately after we moved to a work from home status. Our lending solutions team launched an online Paycheck Protection Program offering for our customers within three business days of the CARES Act being passed in early April. We had customers processing loans for their small businesses two days before the SBA was ready to start funding those loans. We also expanded our lending network to provide support for our clients who were unable to book a loan for one or more of their small business clients. To date, we have helped our clients process almost 70,000 loans through the PPP program. And lastly, as you can probably imagine, call volumes in our call centers have increased exponentially as our customers and their consumers moved out of their offices due to various stay-at-home orders. During that time, not only have the Jack Henry customer service team risen to the occasion, but they did so while improving our already industry-leading response times and customer service ratings, truly remarkable. These are just a few examples of the outstanding efforts put forth by our team during this crisis. In the past, many of you have commented on the unique culture at Jack Henry, a culture built on the “do the right thing and do whatever it takes” mantra. Never has that culture been on display in a more meaningful way than what we’ve witnessed during the past couple of months. I could not be more proud of our team and their ongoing commitment to our customers and our company, and I thank every one of them for weathering this storm with grace and passion. Of course, we’re not at the end of the road when it comes to dealing with the ongoing impacts of COVID-19. We continue to operate primarily in a remote status and our customers continue to get comfortable with their new operating model. Although most of our clients are still unsure about the long-term impacts on their businesses, we’re seeing many get back to focusing on the day-to-day. A good measure of this shift is the level of engagement we saw with our sales team in April as things started to settle a bit. Of particular note, we’ve already signed five new core competitive takeaways in April, as well as a variety of other new contracts, and the combined sales organization exceeded their quota for the month. We will be closely monitoring sales performance and sales pipelines as the fourth quarter continues to progress. With that, let’s shift our focus to look at our performance for the quarter we completed in March. For the third quarter of fiscal 2020, total revenue increased 13% for the quarter and increased 9% on a non-GAAP basis. The conversion fees were up almost $15 million over the prior year quarter with almost all of that variance attributed to a single customer in New York. If you exclude the deconversion revenue variance and focus on the non-GAAP number, you can see we posted a very strong overall revenue quarter. Turning to the segments, we again had a solid quarter in the core segment of our business. Revenue increased by 12% for the quarter and increased 7% on a non-GAAP basis. Our payments segments also performed well posting an 11% increase in revenue this quarter and then an 8% increase on a non-GAAP basis. We also had an extremely strong quarter in our complementary solutions business with a 16% increase in revenue this quarter and an 11% increase on a non-GAAP basis. Despite the obvious COVID-19 challenges for the sales team at the end of the quarter, all three of our sales groups again hit or exceeded their quotas, and for the year, they continue to run ahead of last year’s record pace. In the third fiscal quarter, we booked 14 competitive core takeaways and 11 deals to move existing in-house customers to our private cloud environment. Our Banno Digital Platform continues to see very strong demand with 24 new clients signing for the full digital suite in the quarter. We also signed 16 new clients to our new card processing solution. Speaking of the new card processing platform, we have been providing regular updates on our progress during these calls for the past several quarters. We are now 82% complete with the migrations, and we ended March with almost 750 financial institutions on the new platform. Prior to the onset of COVID-19, we were poised to wrap the migration for our core clients by June 30 and had all 136 of those clients scheduled to convert in April, May, and June. In early April, however, several of the clients on those lists asked us to delay the schedule because they had minimized their employee presence in their offices and didn’t want to introduce any new payment solutions while their employees and customers were working remotely. As disappointed as we were to introduce the delay in a project that has been moving along so well, we determined it was definitely the right thing to do. As a result, we have delayed any migrations previously scheduled in our fiscal Q4 into Q1 of fiscal 2021. I anticipate the migrations for our 86 non-core clients will also be delayed as a ripple effect, so we now plan to see those migrations happen in fiscal Q3 of 2021. Regarding implementations for our other solutions, we are working closely with our customers who are scheduled for on-site delivery of our solutions to ensure their needs are met while taking all necessary safety precautions for our employees when they are required to be at a customer site. Delays of customer system installations due to COVID-19 have been very limited, and we’ve developed processes to handle remote installation when applicable. We expect these processes to provide the flexibility and value both during and after the pandemic. They’ll continue to work as a partner with our customers regarding implementation plans, customer service needs, and support for their end customers to ensure they get the help they need during this difficult time. Despite the uncertainty caused by the ongoing pandemic, let me remind you of a few of the fundamentals about our company. Fundamentals we emphasize regularly in our discussions with investors and analysts. First, more than 85% of our revenue is recurring in nature. Second, we have very little debt on the balance sheet and we continue to operate with a solid cash position. Third, we paid a dividend for 119 consecutive quarters and we continue to be committed to our dividend policy moving forward. Fourth, we have an extremely engaged workforce as evidenced by our Employee Engagement survey results and Best Place to Work awards. And finally, remember that we weathered the financial crisis 12 years ago with very few bumps or bruises. As we move forward, we will inevitably continue to implement minor changes to our delivery and service models. But we don’t anticipate the need to make any significant changes in the way we serve our customers. We have a commitment to doing the right thing for our employees, customers, and shareholders, that we believe will serve us well as we adjust to the new normal. We will continue with our disciplined approach to run the company and expect that approach to help provide continued stability for our company as we move to the other side of this pandemic, at some point in the future. With that, I’ll turn it over to Kevin for some detail on the numbers.

Thanks, Dave. The service and support line of revenue increased 15% compared to the prior year quarter. Our outsourcing and cloud services continue to be a big driver in this line of revenue with an 18% increase compared to last year. As Dave mentioned, deconversion fees were up $14.7 million compared to last year’s quarter and all of those are included in this line of revenue. If you back out deconversion fees and contribution from acquisition, this line of revenue on a non-GAAP basis grew by 8%. The processing line of revenue, which is all of our transaction, remittance, and digital, grew 9% compared to the prior year quarter, and again, there are no deconversion fees in that line of revenue. Our total revenue was up 11% for the quarter compared to last year, and on a non-GAAP basis, revenue was up 9% for the quarter, which is slightly ahead of our previous guidance. Our reported consolidated operating margins increased slightly from 20% last year to 21.4%, primarily due to the increase in deconversion fees. On a non-GAAP basis, our operating margins decreased slightly from 18.5% last year to 18.1% this year, primarily due to the continued increase in additional costs related to a card processing platform migration. With the delayed migrations that Dave mentioned, we will continue to see these margin headwinds for the remainder of the fiscal year and into next fiscal year, through Q3 of FY 2021. Until we can eliminate the additional costs related to the platform migration, with this shift in timing and the impacts of COVID-19, at this point it’s hard to determine exactly when we will see margin improvements next fiscal year. However, we will definitely see margin improvements in our payments in Q4 of FY 2021, which will get the full year impact in FY 2022. The impact of these cost reductions at that point will remove headwinds and allow us to return to a position of leveraging our operating income margins in FY 2022. Our core and complementary segment operating margins continue to improve, with the continued pressure from our payments segment just discussed offsetting that improvement. The effective tax rate for the quarter decreased to 19.7% compared to 22.4% last year. This is primarily due to the difference in the uncertain tax positions, which are reserved annually under FIN 48 according to the IRS, and with the lasting statute of limitations between the two periods respectively, reserves are released. This quarter was impacted a little more heavily due to the additional and above-normal releases related to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act eliminating the Section 199 deduction, so there were no new reserves to offset those Section 199 reserves that were released. Net income was $73.9 million for the third quarter compared to $59.3 million last year, with earnings per share of $0.96 this year compared to $0.77 last year. The $0.96 for the quarter included positive impacts from deconversion fees and taxes, which were offset by the negative impact from the loss on disposal of assets. Considering these adjustments, our earnings per share related to operations came in slightly ahead of the consensus estimate for the quarter of $0.80. For cash flow, our total amortization increased 5% year-to-date compared to last year, due to capitalized projects being placed into service. Included in the total amortization is amortization of intangibles related to acquisitions, which decreased to $15.4 million year-to-date this fiscal year compared to $15.6 million last year. Our depreciation is up year-to-date primarily due to the timing of data center CapEx that we discussed a year ago being placed into service last fiscal year, which has been depreciating for a full nine months this year. Our operating cash flow was $276.4 million for the year-to-date, which was up from $233.4 million a year ago. We invested $126.8 million back in our company through CapEx and product development, which is up 2% from $123.9 million a year ago. A couple of comments on our balance sheet; we currently have a cash position of $109.5 million and we’ll be sending annual maintenance billings at the beginning of June. In February this year, we renewed our revolver with a five-year term and increased the maximum borrowings to $700 million. There was a $55 million withdrawal on a revolver at the end of the quarter at March 31; however, we anticipate paying that off by June 30 with net cash. We have no other long-term debt on our balance sheet other than leases. We are closely monitoring and modeling all lines of revenue and watching relative key performance indicators. We are focused and monitoring cost controls, especially in significant areas like headcount, travel, meetings, and discretionary spend. In our guidance, we are anticipating a slow rebound in debit card usage as parts of the country reopen. At this point, it appears that income from deconversion fees will be down approximately $1 million compared to last year’s Q4, which, just to remind you, we have no control over the timing of recognized deconversion fees that we receive. As reported in the press release, our GAAP guidance for revenue for Q4 is in a range of $408 million to $415 million, with EPS of $0.77 to $0.79 per share. Our full year revenue guidance was increased to a revenue range of $1.695 billion to $1.702 billion, with full year earnings per share of $3.83 to $3.85. We will continue to experience revenue and operating income fluctuations between our fiscal quarters due to various factors such as license revenue, implementation timing, our ongoing payment platform migrations, and software subscription usage, which obviously you’ll see in Q1 of next year. We anticipate GAAP operating margins for Q4 to be down slightly from last year’s fourth quarter; for the full fiscal year, it should be mostly in line with FY 2019 at approximately 22.5% operating margins. Our effective tax rate for FY 2020 should end up at approximately 23% for the full fiscal year. As we’ve historically done, we will be providing revenue and earnings guidance for FY 2021 during our Q4 and year-end earnings call that we will have in August. We are currently in the process of developing our budgets for FY 2021 and evaluating the overall impact to be anticipated and expected from COVID-19. At the same time, developing our FY 2021 budget, we will be focused primarily on targets and forecasts specifically for Q1 of FY 2021 to assist with the guidance we will provide in August. However, I would remind you, as I know you’ll be working on your models before we provide official guidance, as Dave mentioned, our recurring revenue year-to-date is over 85% and if you remove the one-time deconversion fees from total revenue, our recurring revenue is actually a little over 88% of our total revenue. So be sure to use those as you’re building your models for FY 2021 before we give official guidance at our year-end earnings call. This concludes our opening comments. We’re now ready to take questions. Stephanie, will you please open the caller lines for questions.

Your first question comes from the line of Dan Perlin with RBC Capital Markets.

I hope everyone is healthy and safe. I wanted to start off just at a high level in terms of - as you’ve had conversations or both of you’ve had conversations with your bank partners. I’m wondering what type of insights they’re providing back to you in terms of the health of that channel. Like right now it feels like things are relatively stable but it does also feel like things are likely to get worse there and so I’m just wondering what kind of anecdotal evidence you’re hearing from those partners.

Good morning, Dan. It’s Dave. So good question, obviously probably not a surprise to you. We’ve been talking to a lot of our customers here in the past several weeks. I’ve talked to a few CEOs just in the past three or four days and I think the consistent feedback from them is that the crisis we’re in right now was caused by a health crisis, not a financial crisis. Obviously, it’s created ramifications throughout the U.S. economy, but the bankers and credit unions that we work with and the CEOs I’m talking to have emphasized over and over again that the health of the institutions was really very solid before this came on. So they’re well capitalized, their credit quality is high, and there’s plenty of liquidity in, so they’re feeling generally pretty strong about the opportunities in the future lending forward. For those who chose to participate in the PPP program, they were being paid by the SBA to process those loans. So there’s an income stream for them there, and that’s helping for some institutions. Some have been very successful in the PPP program, and so they feel strongly about the fact that they’re not only helping small businesses but also helping save Main Street by being administrators of that program and working with small businesses to help them out. But there is a concern about what the future looks like here and when do things 'return to normal.' Generally, they’re pretty upbeat that they can weather this storm, and yes, they’ll have to be able to accept some businesses that are maybe troubled, put off some mortgage payments, and so on. But they’re generally pretty positive about the future, and I think it’s because they recognize that although this is turning into a financial crisis, it wasn’t caused by banks like the one that we went through 12 or 13 years ago.

Yes, to Dave’s point, I mean we came out of that one in 2009, 2010 pretty much unscathed and that was a financial crisis. So, I mean obviously there are going to be some issues with the financial industry coming out of this, but the good thing, as Dave said, most financial institutions went into this very well capitalized with strong balance sheets and they seem to still be in a pretty good place.

That’s great. And just as a quick follow-up in terms of trying to understand the implementation cycle impact. I think you gave some good color there. But it does seem like there are going to be some air pockets that get created, and so what I’m actually interested in is can you just help us understand how you would do digital knowledge transfer if you couldn’t be physically on-prem for some of these - if this was much more protracted and say but one quarter that you’re going to allude to push into kind of I think the first quarter of next year. Thank you.

Sure, yes. It’s been fun and exciting and kind of remarkable frankly to see the implementation teams shift gears into a new mode of delivery. A lot of the solutions that we deliver were already delivered virtually, and we do training online. We do training. We weren’t using a whole lot of video to do training before; we are now as people have become much more comfortable with video technology. But we did a lot of implementations remote previously, and many of our teams have adapted the way they do implementations, adapted the way they do training, taking advantage of virtual tools like video to do training. So it really hasn’t interrupted our implementation pipeline much at all. In fact, I think it was two weekends ago, we did three core conversions on that same weekend. It was either two or three weekends ago, and we’re installing the Banno Digital suite. This has always been installed virtually, not always, but for over a year or so it has been installed as a virtual install. So the teams have adapted, and we’re delivering things differently. There are some customers who aren’t 100% comfortable all the time. They want somebody there to hold their hands, and so you know we kind of work through that. But most of our solutions now we’re in a position to implement virtually.

And Dan for some implementations, I mean, we still are sending people on-site, which is one of the nice things about having our own corporate planes, so we can safely take our employees to the facilities and work with the banks through a safe distancing relationship. We have always done a lot of classroom training virtually, which we’re doing that now. We’ve got several classrooms set up with multiple monitors to do training, so that was already in place. The nice thing about this is, we were already 27% of our employees were working remote anyway, and probably another 25% to 30% work from home at some point during the week. This was a pretty easy adaptation for us to get to where we are today.

It’s great to hear. Thank you so much.

Your next question is from the line of Vasu Govil with KBW.

Good to talk to you and I’m glad everyone is doing well. I guess just the first question on the revenue deceleration in the fourth quarter. I mean even excluding the deconversion fees, it feels like there would be a slight slowdown. Could you talk about what’s driving the impact by segment? Is it mostly the payment segment where you’re expecting to see the weakness? If you could give us some color there.

The primary drive we’re seeing and what we’re projecting in Q4 is that we did see a slowdown in our debit card usage in the last half of March, even though we still had strong payments go through the quarter. We continue to see that slower debit usage in April, and like I said in opening comments, we are assuming and predicting that we will see some rebound in June as the country opens back up; that is the primary drag on the revenue growth in Q4.

Got it, that’s helpful. And I guess, I know you will give guidance for 2021 next quarter, but if you could give us some high-level color, do you think that fourth quarter will be the top in terms of growth rates or could there be a drag effect depending on what you see on sales? And could you perhaps compare and contrast how the impacts this time might be different from what you saw in the Great Financial Crisis back then? I guess revenues sort of went from double-digit to flat and then recovered back pretty quickly. What kind of recovery curve might you see this time? Thank you.

I think it’s a little different now to look at our financials compared to what you saw back in the financial crisis, and the difference is ASC 606. Remember we’re now under different revenue recognition rules than we were back then, so when we were able to start delivering software a little quicker back then, which obviously we don’t deliver a whole lot of software now. So, you’re not going to see a sudden rebound. However, we’ve been under ASC 606 for two years now and we will be by the end of this fiscal year. So now you kind of see the fluctuations created in our financials over the last couple of years, which Q1 is typically the high quarter now because of all the software usage and subscription revenue that has to be recognized at the beginning of the year, which grows every year as we continue to sell those throughout the year. Then it kind of tapers off throughout the year from Q1 to Q4, which is kind of opposite from the way it used to be. As I said in opening comments, with recurring revenue being 88% of our total revenue, we still have a solid backlog. Through Q1, our sales bookings were still up 12% over last year. As Dave pointed out in his opening comments, we actually exceeded our quota for April. So do we anticipate some headwinds on sales? Yes. But having said all that, I feel really good going into FY 2021 at this point.

Thanks, that’s very helpful.

I think a key point to remember there is that when we sign a new core customer, we don’t see any of that revenue for months after that customer is signed. Once we do start to see revenue, it’s layered in, as opposed to getting a pop in that revenue. So, that’s core. Many of our other solutions may have a shorter implementation timeline, but it is rare for us to sell - we’re not a sell-and-bill kind of company normally. We’re sell and put in the backlog, and the revenue gets rolled out, so that’s part of the predictability of the model.

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of David Togut with Evercore ISI.

Good morning, Kevin and Dave. Hope you’re both staying well. Just bridging to the earlier question, could you talk about potential inflection points in the business as a result of COVID-19? For example, you’ve had very strong demand for the Banno Digital suite. Do you expect to see an accelerating shift towards digital banking as more consumers perhaps don’t want to walk into bank branches?

That’s a good question, David, and definitely I think you’re on the right track. So, the things that we’re seeing right now, it was interesting as the whole COVID-19 thing was coming into play. Back in March, there was a lot of speculation that people would immediately try to upgrade their digital presence. In fact, the reaction was kind of opposite - 'I don’t want to mess with anything right now. My consumers are all changing their behavior. I just want to leave things alone.' But now that that’s settled in, we have a lot of customers realizing that for them to be successful going forward they do have to seriously look at upgrading their digital presence and that’s not just what we used to call mobile banking; it’s the entire digital banking suite including opening accounts online, and so on. We definitely are seeing a shift in interest and shift in conversations about that as people are thinking about the future and trying to make sure they’re positioned well for it. And I think there will be more things. Online commercial lending, and we’ve talked many times on these calls about the outstanding technology we developed for commercial lending online. We had signed number of banks and some credit unions for that technology, but many of them still view commercial lending as opposed to consumer retail lending. Commercial lending is a function where somebody has to come into the branch; you can’t possibly do a commercial loan without looking that person in the eye. Today, guess what? They’re doing a lot of commercial lending digitally. We have a number of customers looking at upgrading that piece of technology as well. So I think you’re absolutely spot on; as we look for the future, digital will be much more of a topic than it has been.

And then another thing I would like to add, David, obviously as Dave pointed out in his opening comments, we signed 11 additional existing core customers to move from in to out. I think COVID-19 is going to continue if not accelerate that trend somewhat, and I think our Hosted Network Services offering will probably grow even faster than it was because some FIs are realizing that they really don’t want to have to mess with any of the technology and would rather us do it. Again, that’s a prediction on my part. It’s too early to tell, but I have to believe that is going to be part of this whole conversation in FY 2021 going forward.

Thanks for that. Just a follow-up question on capital allocation priorities. Kevin, you highlighted the strength of the balance sheet. How are you thinking in this environment about capital deployment when you look at your share price? Obviously dividends have been a priority for many years, and then potential acquisitions to the extent seller expectations have come down versus let’s say six months ago?

I mean obviously we’re in a very good capital position. As Dave pointed out, we’ve paid dividends for 119 straight quarters; I don’t see us breaking that streak. We have a board meeting next week, and at that point we’ll probably be announcing another dividend and of course that’s up to the board, not to me. So dividend is a priority. But you’re absolutely right. We continue to talk to bankers about potential M&A activity, and we think that there will be some better opportunities later in this calendar year and into next calendar year. In fact, I received emails from three different bankers this morning who wanted to call us to talk about potential deals and things. So obviously, our number one priority is to continue looking at those acquisitions that give our shareholders a continued strong return. We will continue to increase dividends, and we’ll continue to look at buying back stock. I think under the circumstances right now, I don’t know that would be viewed extremely well for us with buying back stock, but obviously if there was a dip in our stock price, we would probably jump in with both feet.

Thanks very much. Be well.

Thanks, Dave.

Your next question comes from Kartik Mehta with Northcoast Research.

Kevin, just to get your perspective. I know in August you’ll provide a lot more about FY 2021, but Dave, then you talked a little bit about credit card migration and impact on margins. As you look at FY 2021 early on, would you expect non-GAAP operating margins to be flat in FY 2021, or are there headwinds that could prevent that?

So, and again we’re just working on budgeting quarters at this point, Kartik. Non-GAAP margins in Q1 should be slightly better because of all the software usage and software subscription revenue that gets recognized with very little cost in the first quarter, which should be enough to offset the increased costs for the payments migration. After we do the migrations in Q1, we should get some relief; I’m not sure exactly right now what that relief will be off the payments migration as we’re able to start shutting some things down. So Q2 you might see basically a flat margin, Q3 we’ll continue to do a little bit because of the continued pressure from migration, and then we should see a nice pop in margins in Q4. So again, we’re still in the early budget stages. What I’m hoping for, Kartik, is that margins for next fiscal year are at least equal to this year. But again, it’s really too early for me to even make that prediction.

No, that’s helpful Kevin. And then Dave, you talked a little bit about one of the things that COVID-19 is bringing is maybe more in-house customers looking to go to outsource. What kind of revenue contribution or growth contribution has that had in the past, and it seems like that could help accelerate revenue. So I’m just trying to understand maybe how much of a benefit that’s been in the past, and what you think it could do as we go into the future.

Thanks, Kartik. Essentially, when you go from in-house to outsourcing, the revenues to Jack Henry essentially double because we’re taking on all the processing responsibility for that customer. I think you could probably figure out that our costs aren’t doubled because we roll them into an existing infrastructure, so revenue essentially doubles. Usually when we sign a customer going from in-house to host or private cloud environment, usually they also take on other products at the same time. There’s this add-on effect for them to add products. Those decisions are easier for them in that environment because there isn’t a capital outlay; that decision to add a product doesn’t need to go to the board for approval, they can just add into their monthly fees, so they’re usually pretty comfortable talking about adding things that they wanted to add for a long time. So that move has definitely been a key driver for us in the past and will continue to be for quite some time, even if we speed up the rate of migrations here and we have many, many orders of customer activity in that area before that runs out. So, lots of runway ahead.

Right now, Kartik, we’re at 61% of our core customers are currently in our private cloud. Almost 40% of our close to 1,900 core customers are still in-house, which has the opportunity to move over. As far as revenue contribution, in any given quarter a year, if you go back the last eight or 10 years, we’ve averaged about 45 to 50 a year. But the revenue contribution in any given year can be so significantly different based on the size of the institutions that we move in any given quarter or year.

Thanks, Kevin, and thanks, Dave. Really appreciated.

Your next question comes from John Davis with Raymond James.

Good morning, guys. Glad you’re doing well. Kevin, to start off on the payment’s business for a second. If you assume January and February were probably a double-digit growth. I think March probably exited down low-to-mid single digits. We’ve seen any improvement in April and then kind of what’s embedded, you got positive payments growth embedded in the guide for Q4, any color there would be helpful?

So for the entire quarter, is it going to some growth? Yes, JD, but it’s going to be back-end loaded in the quarter because in April we continue to see some headwinds from lack of usage; people were staying at home. I think now that we’re seeing countries partly opened up again, it’s pretty early to tell. But I think we’re going to see some increase in May and then hopefully a decent rebound in June, but it’s not going to be much growth over last year’s number.

I think one important thing to keep in mind here, so that’s focused on our debit business, our card processing business. There are three aspects of our payments business, which include bill pay and our EPS, ACH origination plus capture business. Both EPS and iPay, our Bill Pay business, are both performing well. They did not see a big - they saw a dip for one week, that week in March where nobody knew what was going to happen tomorrow. But absent that one week, volumes continue to be up year-over-year. Those are part of the key payments infrastructure, not a lot of discretion in a lot of that stuff, so those continue to be up year-over-year even though there’s this impact on the debit switch. I think that’s important to keep in mind; that helps offset some of the potential challenge in the debit business.

Okay, and then complementary, obviously really strong growth in the quarter significantly better than I thought. Anything to call out, and how should we think about the sustainability of that growth, which I think heads over depended on double-digits in the third quarter.

Part of it is digital; digital is in that bucket, and certainly a big chunk of that was our continued implementation of digital solutions, our treasury management solutions, some of the things that we’ve talked about recently, online commercial lending. So a number of those things are in that bucket and we had a strong quarter in all of those areas. Will it be as strong next quarter? I don’t know that I can say that, but it certainly is an area of growth for us and it’s a particularly strong area of focus for our customers. So I think you can assume that segment will continue well.

Okay, last one from me. I think April to-date, I think you signed four competitive takeaways, which is not too far off the run rate that you’ve been averaging. But any commentary on what new RFPs look like? Because assuming those competitive takeaways you won in April were kind of well underway. Are banks kind of just hunkering down for the meantime?

Actually, I quoted five for the month of April. It’s the first time that I ever quoted on an earnings call what’s happening in the current quarter because I thought it was important for you all to know that. Sales has really continued to perform well. But to your question, RFPs, we’ve had some RFPs come in; I think it’s logical to assume the RFP volume has slowed down a little bit. But I will tell you that our pipeline has not dropped at all. What that means is, as you’re booking deals, as deals are getting signed and going out of the funnel, there are new opportunities coming into the funnel, so that we ended April with essentially the same size pipeline that we started April with even though the sales team exceeded their quota for the month of April. I think that’s a good sign, but there’s still activity out there. As I mentioned, we have a lot of bankers now that are starting to think more in terms of returning to focusing on the day-to-day. I won’t say they’re thinking about returning to normal because they still don’t know what normal is. But they’re focused on the day-to-day and they’re thinking about things like digital and about Kevin mentioned our HNS, our Hosted Network Solutions service. Things that will help them with the efficiency, things that will help them with expense control. There’s a lot of talk about bankers now focusing on moving to a single source provider which is great news for Jack Henry because we have such a broad suite of solutions, and we believe that may help us pick up some business where customers may be reusing a small third-party for one piece or ten pieces of their solution set. Maybe they’ll bring one or two or three of those to us as they’re focused more on minimizing risk and working with a single source provider. So I think there are a lot of things happening right now that bode well for Jack Henry, but we need a little more time under our belt here to really say with confidence that the sales process isn’t going to be negatively impacted.

The other thing I’d point out, JD, is obviously back in 2009, which was obviously different times and different circumstances, but it was still kind of a hailstorm that the financial institutions are going through today. I would say in 2009 our core system evaluations actually increased from what they were before the financial crisis started. We did have a lag in some of our accounts and many products. But I don’t think we can see that this time because of the increased demand for digital and some of the other things that I mentioned like commercial lending. So I think we continue to be in a very good position to face these challenges going forward.

Okay, all right, thanks guys.

Your next question comes from the line of Peter Heckmann with Davidson.

How are you going to handle user conferences, trade shows and how much do those typically contribute to sales of ancillary products?

Yes, so it’s a good question. Actually, I’m dressed up today for the first time in six weeks. I’ve actually got a sport coat on because as soon as we end this call, I’m going to go and record a virtual presentation for our first client conference since the pandemic struck. So what we’ve done is we normally host a client conference in April and one in May, and the one in May, of course, normally leads up to the Analyst Conference that we tend to visit with all of you at. Both of them have been turned into virtual conferences and these are smaller conferences as opposed to our large conferences at the end of the year. I think I saw this morning we have somewhere around 400 attendees currently that are registered for this conference. So we’ll be doing that virtually, continuing to share information with them. We have the next - our normal, big annual conferences would be in September and October. We’re still talking about what we’re going to do with those conferences, so will people be comfortable gathering in a large group for an industry conference in September and October? As I sit here right now, I don’t know, so that’s a big topic for us. And as you point out, those are good opportunities from a sales perspective to share information about product and so on. We’re doing a lot of remote demonstrations today; that sales organization pretty quickly moved toward focusing on remote demonstration back in March. So if we aren’t able to host large client conferences at the end of the year, I’m confident that we’ll be doing virtual conferences, and included in those conferences will be opportunities for us to demonstrate solutions. The good news is, when you do a remote conference, you tend to get a lot more people signing up because there are no travel expenses, and so it may expose us to more eyeballs than we would in person. But we’re not at that point yet where we’re ready to make that decision.

Pete, the education conferences we have, the big ones for credit unions and then for the JC for banks and ProfitStars - I mean those are truly educational conferences. Are there some sales opportunities from those? Yes, they serve quite a few leads, typically yes. But those are truly educational conferences and if we have to go virtual, we’ll still do large education portions of that for people who want to sign up, because that’s what we want to do to make sure that our customers continue to learn how to better use our products and make their institutions more efficient.

Got it, okay. And then one other question I had, just on real-time payments; the release you had out earlier in the week. Can you talk about some of the use cases for real-time payments and what the fees might look like that the bank might charge to the payer? What will those payments conditions be shared from?

It’s a good question; I think that opportunity is still developing not only for us but certainly for our customers. A lot of our customers aren’t exactly sure yet what the depths of the opportunities are for them. But all of us, I think our customers and Jack Henry, view the real-time payments opportunity very differently from the Zelle opportunity. So Zelle is real-time peer-to-peer, but as we’ve stressed many times on these calls, there’s not really much of a money-making opportunity when it comes to Zelle; it’s hard to make money on free services. Zelle has not been in focus as far as making money. For real-time payments, there definitely is a money-making opportunity because not only will it be used for consumer payments, but we see it being used for commercial payments. Our expectation is that it will definitely impact check volume because keep in mind today, most of the paper check volume that’s out there is in business payment. I think it will play a role in displacing ACH transactions that are happening out there today. So that is an opportunity as far as we see it, and then possibly card, but I think it’s much more likely to replace ACH and current paper check payments as real-time payments start to rollout.

Okay, that’s helpful. Thanks, Dave.

Your next question comes from Dave Koning with Baird.

I guess first of all, just a follow-up on my Kartik’s question. When you talked about margins, was that all kind of ex-term fees when you said you expected to be up somewhat in fiscal 2021? Was that ex-term fees and including term fees? I would imagine it might be down a little, just given that you had the big term fee this quarter.

That would be true, yes.

Okay. And I guess one other one just on margins. We can see the margins coming down a little bit obviously with the implementation and all. Is there a clear view like low-term fees, taking out all implementation stuff, are the core margins still going higher and what’s driving that? Just core revenue growth?

You can look at just the segments and yes, both GAAP and non-GAAP went up through the quarter on margins for payments and complementary, and obviously the big driver is the continued growth in those segments that I discussed. Our hosted and cloud services were up 18% this quarter over a year ago, and that’s still double digits. I think on a non-GAAP basis, we’re still at like 12% or 13% for the year. So that’s been the same for the last three or four years. I don’t see that changing going forward or even into next year. The complementary segment continues to be driven by a lot of our private cloud products like digital and other things. But both segments grew nicely and essentially offset the decrease and margins in the payments segment.

Yes, got you. Okay. That’s helpful, and then finally, is there any big difference between what your core clients are doing in an environment like this relative to your ProfitStars clients like is there at all a divergence in how you see activity over the next couple quarters, one growing a lot faster than the other or is it just all pretty good though?

No, I would say it’s all - there’s no difference between core and ProfitStars as far as sales success or what we’re seeing. So I emphasize the core deals that we’ve done in April just because I knew they would be on your minds wondering whether that big revenue driver has totally stopped. But no ProfitStars performed really well in April and has continued and is about the same pace.

All right, stay well and great job.

Your next question comes from the line of Brett Huff with Stephens, Inc.

I’m glad everybody at Jack Henry is doing okay and thanks for the questions. First one is, both of you mentioned I think the relative optimism of banks. I think probably relatively better than many on this call would have assumed. Is there something unique about the group that you hear more optimism from? Are their balance sheets different? Are they different sizes? Are they different-focused things more commercial or less commercial, or is it fairly broad-based?

I’d say it’s fairly broad-based. I tend to talk to CEOs, banks and credit unions that are on the larger side of our base. I’ll say our largest customers today run up in the $30 billion space, and it’s rare for me to talk to a CEO of a financial institution that’s $250 million. It’s much more common for me to talk to somebody who is in the billion range. I think the consistent theme there is what I emphasized earlier; they feel strongly that their balance sheet is strong, they’re well capitalized, they haven’t taken on risky loans. Yes, they have deals they’re going to work through with their customers. But the PPP program many of them have gotten into that in a big way, and the PPP program includes a forgiveness component, which we’ll be working on with a lot of our customers going forward. They tend to know their customers, so they know what their situation is and their ability to work through these things over time. They can’t predict the future any better than you or I. But I think they’re generally, fairly optimistic that they’ll be able to weather this storm and be okay because they know about the strength of their balance sheet and the strength of their overall portfolio.

And the other thing to remember, Brett, I mean net interest margins actually went up; I mean they’re essentially back to where they were three years ago, and they weathered that storm by figuring out how to get non-interest fee income and different things. It’s basically pulling off a playbook that they were using three years ago.

That’s helpful. And then just in terms of digital usage. You talked about a pause in evaluation of digital products. I think that you said for a week or two and then the conversations resumed, which is a good sign. But we’ve gotten a lot of questions on actual usage. So I guess sort of same store users with a typical bank X, Y, Z that might have 5,000 Banno or NetTeller or whatever products they’re using, goDough. Did that go up meaningfully as folks got more fearful of going into a branch? I mean, did you see absolute numbers of users spike?

The number of users went up for sure. I don’t have those numbers in front of me, but the number of active users went up significantly. The thing that was really startling to me was that when the stimulus checks started to come out, on that single day, we saw a 63% spike in usage in people hitting their account as compared to the prior week, and that week had been up. So what people were doing was going on and seeing if my stimulus check is there yet, no. Five minutes later, is my stimulus there? No. Is my stimulus check there? They were hitting their accounts every five minutes, so volumes just went through the roof. So, it wasn’t that all of a sudden there were a whole bunch of new active users; it was people just over and over checking to see if they had their stimulus check deposited. But that’s all settled down now, and the true run rate per day is up roughly 40% over what we saw before all of this started.

Okay, that’s helpful. Always appreciate the insight, guys. Be safe.

Your next question comes from Tim Willi with Wells Fargo.

Just one question I had regarding, I guess digital and spending by the banks. I guess there’s always been a long debate about whether the bigger banks are winning because they have these large budgets for their own discretionary investment and strategies. The counter argument has always been that people like yourself are able to arm the mid-to-small size banks to be just as effective as those large ones. Given again sort of the acceleration and the technology curve that’s happened over the last couple of years, could you just sort of share your thoughts about where your core customer base is competitively? To the extent that you’re actually sort of keep an eye on fundamentals, because a lot of them are private entities as opposed to public? Is there actually quantifiable evidence when you look at their deposit growth, their loan growth, that shows that yes, absolutely by working with people like yourself or your competitors, these mid-to-small size institutions are actually very competitive in performing versus the big monolithic entities that get a lot of their airtime obviously on NBC about their technology investments?

You packed a lot into that question, Tim. So I may talk for about an hour and a half here to answer your question. Well, I’ll try and do it in a concise manner. First off, you’re right, major players are spending a lot when it comes to technology and it’s been a lot on digital. I would challenge your statement about us trying to position our banks to offer the same service as those banks; that is not what we are doing. We have been very thoughtful in the way we designed our digital solutions to offer a competitive edge to our customers compared to those solutions in functionality. The functionality is just different, and I won’t go through all the puts and takes here, but I feel very strongly that we’ve created a better solution because we know that for our customers, for our banks and credit unions to differentiate against those players in a digital world when that whole aspect of walking into the branch and having a smiling face across the teller line is not there anymore. The technology has to help you differentiate, and we’ve done that with our solutions. We believe strongly that we’ve delivered something that truly is a differentiator. Our customers, I don’t know that we have customers who can say, if you will, on the loan growth side. We can point to the digital presence. I believe that’s there, but I don’t - and people are tracking as much on the deposit growth side, but we have a number of customers who absolutely can point to the digital platform as providing new opportunities for them to grab customer growth and overall deposit growth through that channel. There’s anecdotal evidence, and you’ll see more and more press releases and marketing releases from us on those types of topics as we continue to see more. One of our customers who is a kind of power user of the Banno suite recently did a podcast with the ABA and emphasized how significant the opportunity has been for them. I think the bank is a large about $25 billion bank. They did a podcast with the ABA, and this was a key part of their discussion. This solution has differentiated them in this world of digital. Like I said, I can talk all day, but that’s kind of the short answer to your question. As short as I can make it.

Yes, thank you. And quick follow-up just on M&A, but more from a perspective of your customers. So you’ve also over time sort of shown that the sweet spot of your customer base are more likely to be acquirers of the low-end or sort of M&A situations where your customers tend to get larger. Theoretically, you’ll lose one; they get sold. I’m just sort of curious when you - are your bankers, were they in the mode of 10 years and do a recovery prior COVID in a mode of looking to do M&A as they rebuild their balance sheets and move forward? And again just sort of assuming that mentality will come back as we sort of come through this period of time. Did you feel as if your customers were out looking for deals and M&A to build their own franchises? Had that changed at all?

So you’re right, many of them were active in M&A. In fact, a little while ago, I referenced the fact that we did three core conversions on one weekend. One of those was a brand new core Jack Henry that was converted, but two of them were existing customers converting acquired institutions into their bank. Our customers were definitely on the M&A track acquiring other institutions prior to COVID-19. I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t heard anybody one way or the other say whether they thought this was going to provide an opportunity for them or if they were going to - this was really going to put them off the idea of doing more M&A. I haven’t had those conversations. Everything I’ve been talking to people about has been the future as far as their balance sheet and their interaction with their customers and that kind of thing. But I would expect that once recovery starts to happen, those bankers will be out looking for acquisitions just like we are today actively looking for acquisitions. They’ll be looking to see if there are opportunities.

Great, thanks very much.

Your next question comes from the line of R沮语 with XXX.

Thanks, Stephanie. Thanks for joining us today. Again we’re very pleased with results from our ongoing operations and the efforts of all of our associates to take care of our customers. Our executives, managers, and all of our associates continue to focus on what’s best for our customers and shareholders. Again, thanks for joining us today and with that, I’d like for Stephanie to please provide the replay number.

As a reminder, today’s conference will be available for replay. To access the replay, please dial 1-800-585-8367 or 1-855-859-2056. Internationally please dial 4-040-537-3406. When prompted please enter your conference ID 767-4994. Thank you. This does conclude today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.