The Beekly: Jack Henry's Head of Corporate Sustainability, Tara Brown

​Most sustainability leaders inherit a function. Tara Brown built one.

​As Senior Director of Corporate Responsibility at Jack Henry — an S&P 500 fintech provider serving ~7,400 banks and credit unions, with nearly $2.4B in FY25 revenue — Tara Brown established the company's sustainability program from the ground up in 2020, following a decade in talent development and HR leadership. That path matters: she didn't come up through compliance or ESG consulting. She came up through the business, which shows in how Jack Henry frames sustainability — not as a separate reporting exercise, but as an extension of a 50-year-old operating principle ("do the right thing") tied directly to governance, risk, and shareholder value.

​In this conversation, we get into:

• ​The transition from HR to sustainability leadership — what carries over, what doesn't, and why Tara thinks a people-leader background is an asset rather than a gap when building a materiality-driven program

• ​Six years of report evolution — from the inaugural 2020 report to a 2026 disclosure aligned with TCFD and SASB, including third-party limited assurance on Scope 1 and 2 emissions

• ​Governance that actually holds up under scrutiny — Board-level oversight split between the Audit Committee (reporting integrity) and Risk & Compliance Committee (climate and social risk), with a direct line from the Chief Legal Officer to the CEO

• ​The data center challenges nobody want to talk about — Jack Henry's data center emissions rose due to a co-location migration, and Tara explains why they disclosed the increase, and how they're handling it

• ​Managing a 10-topic materiality assessment at a company with 7,200+ associates and stakeholders ranging from community banks to institutional shareholders

​If you're building or rebuilding a sustainability function inside a public company — particularly one where the CFO and GC need to trust the numbers before the sustainability team gets a seat at the table — this is a template worth studying.