Building on last quarter's momentum, we grew organic ASV plus professional services by 5.8% this quarter.
The Americas growth rate increased to 6% with strength across CTS, research and analytics.
EMEA's growth rate accelerated to 5% improving over the past two quarters.
Asia Pac's growth remained at 9% driven largely by research and analytics.
We have a strong pipeline weighted most heavily toward institutional asset managers, broker-dealers and wealth managers and are increasing our organic ASV guidance to $85 million to $95 million for this fiscal year.
We grew organic ASV plus professional services by 5.8%, reflecting in part the client demand for our solutions driven by their own digital transformation needs.
To that point, in line with the $14 million captured last quarter with the Americas price increase, we added $8 million from our international price increase this quarter.
For the quarter, GAAP revenue increased by 7% to $400 million.
Organic revenue which excludes any impact from foreign exchange, acquisitions and deferred revenue amortization increased 6% to $397 million.
As a reminder, ASV represents the next 12 months of revenue.
For our geographic segments, organic revenue growth for the Americas grew to 6%, EMEA grew to 5% and Asia Pacific to 11%.
GAAP operating expenses grew 12% in the third quarter to $282 million, impacted by higher cost of services.
Compared to the previous year, our GAAP operating margin decreased by 300 basis points to 29.5%, and our adjusted operating margin decreased by 390 basis points to 31.6%.
As a percentage of revenue, our cost of services was 570 basis points higher than last year on a GAAP basis and 560 basis points higher on an adjusted basis.
SG&A expenses when expressed as a percentage of revenue improved year-over-year by 270 basis points on a GAAP basis and 170 basis points on an adjusted basis.
Moving on, our tax rate for the quarter was 12% compared to last year's rate of 15% primarily due to lower operating income this quarter, and a tax benefit related to finalizing prior year's tax returns.
GAAP earnings per share was almost flat to last year at $2.62 this quarter versus $2.63 in the prior year.
Adjusted diluted earnings per share decreased 5% to $2.72.
Free cash flow which we define as cash generated from operations, less capital spending was $122 million for the quarter, a decrease of 13% over the same period last year.
For the third quarter, our ASV retention continued to be above 95%, and our client retention improved to 91% which speaks both to the mission criticality of our solutions and the solid efforts and focused execution of our sales teams.
We grew our total number of clients by 7% compared to the prior year to over 6,100 clients, largely due to the addition of more wealth and corporate clients, including private equity and venture capital firms.
And our user count grew 11% year-over-year and crossed the total of 155,000, primarily driven by wealth and corporate users.
For the third quarter, we repurchased over 178,000 shares of our common stock for a total of $58 million, at an average share price of $323.
We also increased our quarterly dividend by 6.5% to $0.82 per share, marking the 22nd consecutive year that we have increased our dividend.
Given our strong performance this quarter, and our confidence that we will execute successfully on a healthy pipeline as we close out the fiscal year, we are increasing our full-year organic ASV plus professional services guidance range to $85 million to $95 million.
The related expense would impact our margins by an incremental 60 basis points to 75 basis points.

Summary:
GAAP earnings per share was almost flat to last year at $2.62 this quarter versus $2.63 in the prior year.
Adjusted diluted earnings per share decreased 5% to $2.72.