2015 Business Class Honoree: Jack Henry & Associates Inc.

People tend to notice you when you’re the biggest dog in the yard. For nearly four decades, Jack Henry & Associates Inc. has been a leader in the packed industry providing financial-services software to banks and credit unions. The multistate firm with nearly 40 offices and more than 5,500 employees supports the processing software for over 11,900 financial institutions and corporations.

And it all started when co-founder Jack Henry had to make a choice between fixing the nonworking computer system he convinced his employer to purchase, or get fired.

“He decided to make it work,” says Jack Henry Banking President Stacey Zengel.

Zengel says the software Henry modified worked quite well. When the bank was acquired by another, Henry asked for the software he had developed in lieu of severance pay.

“And that was the start of Jack Henry & Associates,” Zengel says. “It was a true rags-to-riches story.”

When Henry and partner Jerry Hall built their first software in a muffler-shop garage 39 years ago, technology was still very new, especially in banking. Now, the industry is driven by technology and focused on providing consumer-facing applications, Zengel says.

“Internet banking, mobile applications, terminal applications – that’s the really big change in the industry in the past three years and our company has adapted,” he says.

Adaptation comes in the form of new services and products, but the biggest, according to Zengel, is the trend of financial institutions transitioning from servicing their own software, hardware and programs in-house to outsourcing the responsibility to Jack Henry.

“Since 2007, we have had about 300 in-house customers move to outsourcing,” he says.

Zengel cites multiple reasons financial institutions choose to transfer maintenance back to Jack Henry, including difficulty in finding and retaining information technology talent, a litany of security challenges and a crackdown by federal regulators on disaster recovery.

“They don’t have to worry about that if they move their solutions to us,” he says.

Since its inception, Jack Henry has acquired around 50 businesses to fill out its product needs. Now, it boasts a robust suite of products that provide core information processing solutions to the community banks and larger credit unions it services, according to Zengel. Jack Henry offers three marketed brands to its clients, including Jack Henry Banking, which provides integrated data-processing systems to more than 1,330 banks with assets of up to $30 billion; Symitar, which offers core data processing solutions to the company’s more than 750 credit union clients; and ProfitStars, which delivers financial processing to institutions that are not core customers.

“You never can rest on your laurels and not improve what you have and also continue to look at new technologies,” Zengel says. “We have really a dual focus: Continue to develop and enhance what we have and also develop new technology.

“You have to have the ongoing development but you also have to have the research side of things, too, and we have both.”[[In-content Ad]]