Jack Henry & Associates Inc (JKHY) 2016 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Jack Henry & Associates first quarter 2016 earnings conference call.

(Operator Instructions)

As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Mr. Kevin Williams. Sir, you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for the Jack Henry & Associates first quarter fiscal 2016 earnings call. I'm Kevin Williams, CFO, and on the call with me today is Jack Prim, our CEO.

The agenda for the call this morning is Jack will start with some of his thoughts about the business and the performance of the quarter. Then, I will provide some additional thoughts and comments regarding the press release and the earnings we put out yesterday after the market closed. And then, as normal, we will open the lines up for Q&A.

I need to remind you that remarks or responses to questions concerning future expectations, events, objectives, strategies, trends, or results constitute forward-looking statements or deal with expectations about the future. Like any statement about the future, these are subject to a number of factors which could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those which we anticipate due to a number of risks and uncertainties, and 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."

With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jack.

Thanks, Kevin. Good morning, and welcome to our first quarter earnings call for fiscal year 2016. We are pleased to again be able to report a solid performance for the quarter.

Revenue growth was strong, at 7%, although direct year-over-year comparisons to specific revenue components, especially license fees, are less meaningful due to the prior-period restatements and new revenue recognition procedures.

Perhaps the most noteworthy takeaway regarding revenue is that license fees now have a minimal impact on our revenue, making up less than 1% of the total in the last quarter, while our largest revenue category, support and services, represented 96% and recurring revenue represented 83% of the total.

Outsourcing and payments again showed strong growth, as did in-house maintenance, based primarily on new credit union core system implementations, even with the continued movement of existing in-house customers to outsourcing.

We held our annual banking and credit union user conferences in the quarter and had record combined attendance, with over 2,200 bank and credit union executives in attendance, including representatives from 30 prospective core customers. Customers were excited to see the progress on our various core product enhancement initiatives and the influence of the recently acquired Banno team on our mobile and electronic delivery channel solutions.

They were also appreciative that the new TILA-RESPA regulatory changes related to mortgage loan disclosures were delivered on time for all JHA systems for the required October implementation date. This was a massive development and deployment initiative that had to be delivered on a very short timeline.

Our sales teams finished the quarter right at 100% of sales plans. Pipelines look solid and, combined with the user sentiment at the conferences, we look forward to continued progress.

With that, I'll turn it over to Kevin for a closer look at the numbers.

Thanks, Jack.

As Jack mentioned, with the change in revenue recognition, our license revenues reported is now clearly immaterial, as it represents less than 1% of our revenue. Remember that the vast majority of what used to be considered license revenue is now included in the bundled services, which is included in the support and services line of revenue.

Support and services line of revenue continues to drive our total revenue growth, as it increased to $307.7 million, which is a 7% increase over the same quarter a year ago of $288.2 million, and, again, represented 96% of our total revenue in both years.

Support and services breakdown for the quarter compared to prior year. Implementation services of $17.1 million, compared to $18.6 million, was a decrease of 8% for the quarter compared to a year ago. Our electronic payments was $126.5 million, compared to $119.4 million, which is an increase of 6% for the quarter. OutLink, which is our OutLink data services, was $70.7 million, compared to $63.1 million, or a 12% increase for the quarter, pretty much in line with what we did last fiscal year. Our in-house maintenance was $84.3 million versus $80 million, or an increase of 5%. And bundled services was up slightly, to $9.1 million versus $7.2 million last year.

Our hardware decreased 4% for the quarter, to $12.3 million, from $12.8 million last year.

Our consolidated gross margins improved: 43% for the quarter, compared to 42% in last year's fiscal year. License margins were 89% for the quarter. Support and service margins were steady, at 43%, compared to the prior-year quarter. And our hardware margins improved slightly, to 29%, from 26% a year ago, due to sales mix.

Our total operating expenses increased 4% for the quarter compared to a year ago, and our operating margin for the quarter increased slightly, to 25%, compared to 24% a year ago.

The effective tax rate for the quarter increased to 36.1%, from 35.5% the first quarter a year ago, which this increase primarily was due to an increase in the effective state rate for the quarter compared to a year ago.

Net income was up 11%, to $1.4 million (sic - see press release, "$51.4 million"), which led to EPS of $0.64 per share, which was up 14% over last year's EPS of $0.56.

EBITDA for the year to date increased to $111.9 million, compared to $101.1 million last year, or an 11% increase, right in line with net income growth.

Depreciation and amortization expense of $31.2 million, with $13 million depreciation and $18.2 million in amortization, compared to $29.5 million last year. Included in total amortization is the amortization of intangibles from acquisitions which was down slightly, to $4.8 million, compared to $5.4 million a year ago.

Operating cash flows were up $33.5 million, a 36% increase, to $126.7 million for the year to date, primarily due to the timing of collections of our annual maintenance billings.

We continue to invest in our Company both through CapEx and cap software on new and existing products, and we continue to return to our shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks.

Our return on equity for the trailing 12 months is right at 23% return.

We also purchased just over 1 million shares for the Treasury in the first quarter.

As far as guidance, our guidance has not changed from that that we gave at the beginning of the year on the last call. Revenue is still projected to grow in the upper-mid-single digits for the year. But remember to consider the impacts of the revenue and margins for the quarters due to the change in the revenue recognition and the impact of bundling services, which grows or compounds revenue during the year, impacting total revenue and margins in each of the quarters.

We continue to anticipate some slight leverage on operating margin for the year. However, remember that the projected effective tax rate for FY16 is 36%, up from 33% last year, since we still can't assume that the R&E credit will be reinstated or repeated. This increase in tax rate will be mostly offset by any positive impact on stock purchases during the year. Obviously, if the R&E credit is reinstated, then we will revise guidance accordingly.

Also, I'd like to remind you for the second fiscal quarter that we are in now, last year had a one-time gain on sale from assets that came through the Goldleaf acquisition. Combine that with the effective tax rate -- our second quarter last year was 32%, compared to the expected 36% this year. And adjusting for just those two items, on an apples-to-apples basis we would have reported $0.60 EPS last year, against the current consensus estimate of $0.68 this year which is probably a little aggressive, also considering we had a couple of pennies positive EPS impact in the first quarter this year that we anticipated to happen in the second quarter from term fees, which our total term fees for the quarter were $7 million this quarter, compared to $5 million last year.

That concludes our opening comments. We are now ready to take questions. So, Leanna, will you please open the call lines up for questions?

(Operator Instructions) Glenn Greene, Oppenheimer.

Could you just sort of help delineate the very, very strong growth in margins in the credit union business? And were the term fees part of that? And conversely, the banking business looked a little bit soft. And then, I had a couple of follow-ups.

Glenn, I think primarily the credit union numbers are just the result of we had several very, very strong sales years. I think in the fiscal year we implemented six credit unions that were over $1 billion in assets. So, we've continued to have good momentum.

I think the credit union progress was one of the reasons that you saw our software maintenance numbers grow even though, again, we continue to see a steady progression of existing in-house customers moving to outsourcing.

So I think it's just basic fundamental business on the credit union side that has continued to grow.

Kevin, anything you'd add to that?

The other thing I'd add, Glenn, is part of it is impacted a little bit by the bundling of services, which just comes down to kind of a timing of delivery of the last products that we've talked about in the last couple of calls.

So, credit unions had a nice impact from that, which the opposite happened to the banking. The bundling of services for banking was down about $2.5 million, and the bundling of services for credit unions was up a little over $4 million.

But even if you back that out, Glenn, our credit union revenue growth was still a little over 15%. So, still extremely solid growth on a year-over-year basis.

And if you think about it for the year, you sort of talked about the revenue growth of the upper-mid-single digits. How would you --? So we don't have to deal with the accounting for the bundling of services, on a full-year basis how would you think about the growth for credit union versus banking?

I think credit union is going to outpace banking by a little bit, but the timing of the bundling of services is just hard to predict, Glenn. It is what it is. It just comes down to when that last product is delivered. And it's tough to anticipate what impact that's going to be.

But I stand behind the guidance of our revenue in the mid- to upper-mid-single digits. And credit union is going to outpace banking just a little bit.

Okay.

I wouldn't think necessarily, Glenn, that it would be at a 15% apples-to-apples growth rate the rest of the year.

No, absolutely not.

Okay. And then, the bigger picture question, maybe just broadly, the spending trend you're seeing, the booking trends you had in the quarter and pipeline, going forward? And one of your peers talked about somewhat of a slowdown in discretionary spending, maybe from bigger banks. But have you seen anything like that?

We have not, Glenn. Again, as I mentioned, the sales teams were right at 100%. They just finished their fifth consecutive year of all three brands obtaining 100% of their assigned quota.

And this is usually a pretty challenging quarter. It's the first quarter of our fiscal year. So, there is a certain amount of rushing to close everything that you can in the fourth quarter. So, to come up with 100% performance in Q1 is certainly, I think, a good sign.

I think the other thing is that the pipelines were up not only compared to where they were a year ago; they were also up compared to where we were at the start of the fourth quarter. So, to be up after, again, that big push in Q4 is a little unusual. Again, they weren't up a tremendous amount, but I would have been happy with flat.

So, I think generally the fundamentals look pretty solid at this point.

The other thing I'd throw in there, Glenn, is Jack mentioned the two user education conferences we just had for JHA Banking and Symitar. We had record attendance at the Symitar meeting. We had close to record attendance on the banking side. It was the highest in years; actually, the highest, I believe, since the recession. And the number of prospects that we had at both the meetings was close to record.

So, that is always a good indication, when people are willing to send their people to an education conference to get more exposure to our product. That's always a good thing for us to come out of there and also to have a large number of prospects attend both of those.

And then, the final one -- and I'll jump back in the queue -- but do you guys have any impact from any big bank M&A that has been announced? There's been a couple of notable ones, but I didn't know if you were on either side of those equations.

No, nothing new, Glenn. The ones that I've seen in the last several months are --. Certainly, we have some banks that are involved with M&A, but we talked about Susquehanna and we talked about CIC a year, or so, ago. But certainly --.

So, nothing like First Niagara-KeyBanc or any of those kind of things?

None of those are impactful to us.

Okay. Great.

Tim Willi, Wells Fargo.

I apologize. I jumped on here a bit late. So, if I ask something that was covered, just tell me to take it offline.

But could you talk a bit about just, again, the whole network hosting solution bit you guys have rolled out? And I know you've just got a handful of customers there, but just any color around interest levels or anything along that nature? And then, also, just I know it's a multiyear type of outlook, but maybe you could just talk a bit about the scalability of that if momentum builds and it takes off?

Tim, we're continuing to see strong interest there. Number of implementations are growing. It's going to be a compounding effect before it becomes a meaningful revenue line item, but we are seeing good growth.

I would tell you that thus far year to date, in terms of the number of units, number of institutions that we had expected (inaudible) behind what we thought we would be, but actually the size of some of the institutions has been larger than we expected it would be. So, if you look at the sales margin dollars that we expected to book, we're actually ahead of where we expected to be, even though the number of actual units, the number of actual financial institutions, is less than we thought that it might be at this point.

But we see very good interest. There was a lot of discussion around those topics at the user conference. The emphasis from the regulatory agencies on cybersecurity is continuing to ramp up and that's again, we think, going to be a tailwind for this type of service.

So, again, probably a little -- a year or two away from this becoming a noteworthy line item in terms of how it shows up in the financials, but we're very pleased with where it is at this point.

Great. And then, just on capital -- and again, if you hit on this in Glenn's questions, I missed it. I apologize. But just any thoughts around how the M&A environment looks like? It looks like in the tech world [boxes] it seems like people are trying to scramble for exits or sales. There's maybe talk of the cost of the capital going up, and valuations in the marketplace obviously continuing to expand.

Have you seen any change around books coming across your desks and/or seller valuations continuing to stretch out? Or, are they starting to flatten out in terms of what they're looking for versus a year ago?

We have not seen any change in expectations of what properties should sell for, Tim. I think deal flow books coming across our desks, nothing noteworthy to mention there.

We don't take the approach of let's just bolt on revenue and buy something just because it's available for sale. If it's a good, strategic fit, if it fits with our sales distribution channels, if it's a product that is something our customers need and we could leverage it through those channels, then certainly we would give it a good look.

But most of what we're seeing continues not to meet those guidelines and, frankly, the few that we've seen in recent history that did fall into those guidelines, the other challenge there was the expectations around selling price. And I don't know that that has moderated yet.

Having said that, Tim, we have an untapped credit facility that we would love to find the right acquisition. So, we will continue to look for them.

Obviously, you guys have a great balance sheet versus the industry, which is not in bad shape. But you obviously are about as pristine as it gets right now.

Just the last one, and I'll hop off. In the payment business and sort of tying into EMV and, I guess, more broadly security, we do hear a lot around the payments companies finding some uptick and not just EMV revenue which might be sort of transitory, but also just enhanced security around their payment businesses, their payment cards, et cetera.

Are you seeing any of that? Is that something that has picked up or do you think that could pick up in that payment business? I don't know if it would be in that line item or a different line item. But just any thoughts there?

Tim, the EMV numbers, there's -- first of all, we're not in the card production business. So, there's no card production or no meaningful card production revenue. We work with outside card manufacturers and while there may be a little bit of a markup there, it's not a meaningful number. So, from the EMV card production, nothing there.

There may be some very slight upticks in some of the processing fees around EMV. But again, I don't think that it would be noteworthy.

Security, for your basic payment processing businesses, I think it's difficult to get paid more for security. I think the kind of security products that we get potentially paid additional for would be like our hosted network services or some of the monitoring intrusion prevention services that we offer to our customers.

Our customers have always expected that their payments are processed securely and I don't think they're willing to pay us anything else for something that they already expect to be included. If anything, I would tell you that we continue to invest significant amounts of money in and around the security area to make sure, in fact, that we do deliver on that expectation that our customers have.

So, other than the security-related products and services that we've offered for some time, I don't know that I see a lot of upside in terms of existing businesses based on security considerations.

Great. That's all I had.

Kartik Mehta, Northcoast Research.

Kevin, as I listen to your comments and you talk about the second quarter and based on your saying maybe a couple of pennies pulled into the first quarter, would you expect year-over-year growth? Or, is that going to be difficult considering the tough comparisons you have and what happened in the first quarter?

I think it's going to be tough to have much of any growth, Kartik. I think if I was going to guide you to something, I would probably guide you to basically flat with last year.

And then, like I said all along, with the bundling or services and everything, our year is going to be more back-end loaded than you all are historically used to. So, we're anticipating a very sizable fourth quarter. So, second quarter is not going to be much, if any, growth.

Obviously, if the Congress puts the R&E credit in before December 31, then all bets are off because then that changes the effective tax rate considerably and then, obviously, we would have growth. That's about the only way I can see that happening.

And Kevin, as you look at where the balance sheet is and the amount of free cash you are going to generate this year and where the stock price is, will you remain aggressive in buying back shares? Or, is this a point in time where you're more comfortable building cash on the balance sheet and waiting for an opportunity either for an acquisition or, if something happens in the marketplace, taking advantage of buying back stock at that point in time?

Well, Kartik, I don't know about being aggressive. We've said for the last couple of quarters that we plan to be more systematic in just buying shares back rather than trying to chase a price. So, I anticipate that we will continue to be in the market. Obviously, we have a Board meeting next week and that will be one of the topics we discuss.

But I don't see any need and I don't think the Board, based on previous conversations, sees any need for us to build cash on the balance sheet. We've got basically a $600 million revolver that's untapped and with our balance sheet and cash flows, if we find an acquisition that's bigger than that, we can get financing pretty quickly to satisfy that.

So, I don't really see any need to keep a whole bunch of cash on the balance sheet.

In fact, we're going to work really hard not to create buying opportunities.

And then, Jack, just one last question here. You talked about the pipeline being really strong and the success you've had on the credit union side. Are you seeing, if you look at the pipeline and spending trends, any changes in how banks or credit unions are spending? Are you seeing more growth in one area or another?

That's a good question, Kartik. Our sales have been pretty solid across the board. There's not any one area -- on previous earnings calls and I'd say essentially the same thing today -- that I would call out as being an exceptional area.

Again, we're continuing to see growth and momentum in some of the new services like the hosted network services. Some of the core activity is probably a little slower than what we'd like to see right now, but that's in terms of in the quarter itself. But it was offset by sales of other products. And I don't necessarily think that observations in a particular quarter represent a trend at this point.

So, it's been more kind of across the board or a number of different areas, nothing I would call out as being particularly unique or different.

There is a lot of interest in some of our electronic delivery initiatives and the internet banking and mobile and tablet functionalities that we're bringing to market. A lot of interest in seeing what we're doing there.

But again, nothing I would point to as being a substantially bigger contributor.

The one thing I would add to that, Kartik, is our trend of existing in-house customers [moving outsource] continues at a very nice pace. I think we had 11 in the first quarter that made that move. So, that trend continues very nicely for us.

All right.

David Koning, Robert W. Baird.

Nice job again. I guess I'm just wondering if we look back for the last probably 20-30 years, there's been kind of -- I was a little bit afear that when the M&A environment picks up for banks that it will hurt your spending. And the last couple of years now, you (inaudible) have pretty high term fees, but yet growth is pretty much as good as ever. Is this just the thesis again playing out that consolidation just doesn't matter that much? Maybe you can just comment on that a little bit?

Well, it's certainly a factor that we've all dealt with for the last 20 or 30 years and have managed, as you indicated, to continue to find ways to grow the business, additional products and services and rounding out our offering. That is certainly our expectation.

It does seem -- and I haven't done the math to actually check this -- but it sort of feels like some of the industry consolidation has picked up a little bit here in the last six months, or so. But again, when you look at it on a full-year basis, will that amount to a 5% shrinkage instead of a 4% shrinkage? Maybe.

But again, I think it's just there are opportunities there. We continue to find them and take advantage of those. And we think we can continue to grow in the current environment.

David, as the slides in our investor presentation have shown for many years, the vast majority of the consolidation is happening at the low level, the lower tier of asset size banks and credit unions, which is not really our playground, anyway.

Okay.

And actually, our target market has actually been pretty stable, if not actually growing, in some of the largest segments.

Yes. Okay. That's good. And then, the in-house maintenance revenue stream you mentioned there, that growth I think was 5%, the strongest in several quarters now. Is that sustainable? Or, was there anything in there that was a little bit one-off? Or, is there just a new core replacement cycle with some of the credit unions that just allows it to stay high for a while?

Well, I would say, David, that the vast majority of that increase in in-house maintenance came from the credit union side, and that is just because we continue to install a lot of in-house credit unions on that side of the business.

As I mentioned, David, last year we converted six credit unions that were over $1 billion in assets. And so, that was throughout the year. So, you're only seeing partial maintenance from those folks throughout the year. So, this would be the fist quarter that would have reflected all six of those for that full period.

And then, again, that's just the six that were over $1 billion. We had 31 credit union sales last year, and some of those are probably being implemented this year.

But anyway, it's just been a solid contributor, and I don't think there were any unusual one-times in there that led to that.

Okay. That's good. And I guess just the last thing, the payment segment has been growing kind of high-single digits for a while. I think it was 6% this quarter. Pretty much nothing -- it hasn't changed much. It decelerated just a touch. But you're not seeing any change really there either, right?

No. Certainly, there has been -- and we've talked about this on previous calls. There has been price compression. Continues to be price compression, particularly on renewals. It's a competitive business and lots of people trying to break into that area.

But, no, beyond just kind of normal competitive activities that we've seen for a while, nothing particularly new.

Okay. Great.

(Operator Instructions) David Togut, Evercore.

This is [Reyna Kamur] for David Togut. Can you go into more detail as to why you anticipate flattish EPS growth for the second quarter? Is it just a tough tax rate comparison? Or, is there more to it?

There's two things. Like I said in the opening comments, Reyna, one, in the second quarter last year we had a one-time gain from sale of some products that came through the Goldleaf acquisition, the teleweb products, which I think that gain was about $5 million in the quarter. And then, also, the effective tax rate last year was 32%, versus 36% this year. So, those combined makes for a pretty tough comparable and a hurdle to get over, just to be flat with last year.

Got it. That's really helpful. Can you provide us an update on your estimate for FY16 capitalized software and [internal-use] software? And maybe just go over what your largest investments are this year?

Well, the areas that we're investing in -- and Kevin can probably give you better insight on the actual numbers -- but the areas that we're investing in, continuing to invest in, is a number of product architecture refreshments on the credit union side, which we've talked about before. We've had a number of improvements that we've made on the banking side.

But the larger types of investments in terms of the percentage of those dollars are going more towards payments-related products and mobile and electronic delivery solutions that we offer.

Kevin, I don't know if you've got guidance on --?

Reyna, the internal software, obviously we've got a lot of projects going on there. As Jack mentioned, a lot of that is security related and other things that we just have to continue to invest in our infrastructure. That's probably going to end up being $12 million to $14 million for the year.

For computer software developed, which all the areas that Jack just mentioned -- payments and mobile and everything else -- with a lot of these products that are going to be driving future revenue. As my quote says in the earnings release, the vast majority of our investment is on these additional products and new products and services that are going to be rolled out in the future. But that's probably going to be somewhere in the $90 million to $95 million for the total year for cap software.

Got it. Okay. You mentioned pricing compression in your electronic payments business. Should we think of mid-single-digit growth as the new normalized revenue growth for that business?

Reyna, that's probably the right way to think about it.

Got it. Could you talk about head-to-head win rates for Symitar versus Fiserv DNA in the quarter?

I don't have that against that specific product. We continue to gain market share from a variety of competitive products. Our win rates are very solid.

A lot of times when a financial institution -- bank or credit union -- goes through an evaluation process, they may end up making the decision to stay with their current provider, usually after receiving a deep discount to do so.

But I would tell you that our win rates remain very strong among those financial institutions who go through an evaluation and do decide to make a change from their current vendor, and that's going to be anywhere from 50% to 60-plus-% win rate among those who will actually go through with a change from their current provider.

In terms of breaking it down among which of the 15 different core solutions we see on the credit union side or, for that matter, the number that we see on the banking side, I don't really track them product versus product.

Got it. Could you call out the term fees in the second quarter of 2015 and your expectation for the second quarter of 2016?

Honestly, I don't have that with me right now. I don't have (multiple speakers) last year second quarter.

Okay. And just one final question. If you can just give us the end-of-period share count?

80,700,000, roughly -- 80,500,000.

Thank you very much.

I'm showing no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to Kevin Williams for closing remarks.

Thank you. Again, we want to thank you for joining us today to review our first quarter Fiscal 2016 results. We are very pleased with the results from our ongoing operations and the efforts of all our associates to take care of our customers. Our executive managers and all of our associates continue to focus on what is best for our customers and our shareholders.

With that, I want to thank you again. And Leanna, will you please provide the replay number?

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. A replay of today's presentation will be available later today. To access the replay, please dial (855) 859-2056. The PIN number is 66570196.

You may all disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.