Jack Henry & Associates KBW Fintech Ecosystem Conference 2026

All right, I think we should get started here for our next session. We are pleased to welcome Mimi Carsley back. She is CFO and Treasurer of Jack Henry. Mimi joined Jack Henry in 2022.

Yeah after holding several senior finance roles at Blucora and serving as Treasurer and EVP of Corporate Development at LPL Financial.

Earlier in her career, she also spent more than a decade at Microsoft. Thank you, Mimi, for joining us and for coming back.

Thank you. Welcome, everyone. Awesome.

I want to start with sort of a high-level question. You have been CFO at Jack Henry for multiple years now, and you have kind of seen the evolution of several technology spending cycles at banks. What has changed in the demand environment or in Jack Henry's own positioning that is driving the strong core momentum that we have seen over the last couple years, probably the strongest that I remember.

Yeah at the company? Just curious from your vantage point, based on the technology cycles, or maybe it is just your own positioning competitively.

Yeah. I think first, banks are fundamentally in healthy positions. I think we have gotten past a lot of post-COVID concerns of like, okay, what happens when that stimulus leaves? You have had the fear of real estate, commercial real estate, auto loans, bankruptcies, and so we are on the other side of that. And so overall, bank balance sheets are quite strong. The higher for longer is an interesting kind of play for them. And what we are seeing in the survey data relative to what we saw even just a couple of years ago, the average response for, "Are you going to be spending more?" was a lower level in absolute response, and the amount they thought they would be spending was lower.

A couple years ago, if we got a response that said 4%-6% increase in spending, we would be pretty excited about that, and now they are saying 88% of the respondents on the recent Bank Director survey said they plan to spend upward of like 6%-10%. And so that is obviously not at all in software, that is across their IT spend, but a very healthy sign for demand. The robustness of our pipeline, we see that. Also some of the what they are looking to buy has changed a little bit too. For the first time in our Strategy Benchmark survey, AI as an area of spend and investment has risen to the top, and then secondarily, around digital and then data analytics.

You are changing some of the composition of some of those solutions as they have already made some of those technical foundational journeys to have, for example, online branch experiences, digital banking, build-outs. Now they are able to get to the next level on their journey.

Great. As core wins have accelerated over the last 18 months or so, how prepared is Jack Henry for what could be a notably larger implementation cycle? What should investors expect for contribution of this acceleration in wins that you've seen flowing through our results?

Yeah. First of all, our pipeline is bigger than ever. I think we said just on the last call here that our pipeline, and 1Q is usually a lower cycle quarter for us for wins. We had nine core wins versus an average of six. But our pipeline is really at elevated robust levels. The interesting thing around that is we've seen no elongation, we've seen no pause in demand cycles. From an implementation perspective, the sales cycle is still roughly around 12 months from a sales, benchmarking, and a product evaluation period, and then the implementation time is usually anywhere between 12 and 18 months. We're seeing some of that compress to revenue, to having implementations live, but there's really like three main drivers of what causes the implementation timeline. One is the readiness of the bank.

You're talking about every process change, every system change, procedural change, and you're not really just looking to flip the switch from take out that tool, replace it with this tool. You really want to do an organizational transformation to leverage the new tool set. So that change management curve is quite intense for the customer, and they'll set the pace of that. We can help, obviously, with knowledge enablement and training, but they set the pace of that friction for their institution. The other is how much custom code they have, and this is where I think AI could really shrink some of that time, because if someone uses a completely out of the box experience and they may like fine-tune some of the settings, that's super easy. We've done that data mapping to every client, every core that exists kind of in the marketplace.

But if they've done a ton of custom code for their organization, that's where it's more of a one-to-one mapping, because you have to figure out what is that custom code? Is that in out of the box functionality in our systems, or do they need something custom as well? That's where I think AI could help us compress. But the last component, and this is the biggest, longest tail, highest pole in the tent, is the remaining life of the contract. Typically, they don't want to pay an exit fee from their existing provider. So even though we could do it earlier and we're starting to see that timeline compress, they're still going to probably do a just-in-time delivery to synchronize the timing of their existing contract ending and the start of the new Jack Henry contract.

That makes sense. I had a question on that AI compressing the implementation cycle, but maybe we will come back to that later.