There might not be a better sector to own shares of than technology on the ASX.
One of the most well respected fund managers in Australia is Regal Funds Management. Its Regal Long Short Australian Equity Fund has outperformed the S&P/ASX 300 Accumulation Index by an average of 4% per annum since inception in 2011.
It has successfully identified some of the best technology shares to own, such as Appen Ltd (ASX: APX) and the AFR has quoted Phil King, the founder of Regal, about which are the best ASX tech shares to own this year, which include:
Bigtincan Holdings Ltd (ASX: BTH)
The company claims to be the "number one 'Sales Enablement Automation' platform to help drive every customer touchpoint with intelligence, speed, and skill." It wants to help sales and service organisations to increase sales and improve customer satisfaction through improved mobile worker productivity.
Regal said it is achieving organic revenue growth of more than 35% from new clients and expanding current contracts, it also has a high customer retention rate and high lifetime customer value. It recently achieved cashflow breakeven and is only trading at 3x current recurring revenue.
iSignthis Ltd (ASX: ISX)
This company helps online businesses in the AML-regulated and financial services sector comply with the ever-increasing regulatory requirements for payments and identity verification.
It just received its ECB banking license in Europe and is now not reliant on third parties to process transactions. iSignthis has a leading anti-money laundering tool and a full range of banking products for the EU and expects to be granted a banking license by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) by the start of July.
It would be the first business to business neobank since PayPal to receive APRA approval.
Credible Labs Inc CDI (ASX: CRD)
Credible Labs is a loan comparison site business.
In the second half of 2018 it originated more than US$700 million, which was up 80% compared to the prior year and now has over 1.3 million accounts.
Regal said Credible Labs "Recently launched mortgage origination platform across 34 US States, expanding addressable market to the $US1.6 trillion US mortgage market, which is 80 times larger than its core student loan market that it currently plays in".
Livetiles Ltd (ASX: LVT)
Livetiles gives developers and business users tools to easily create dashboards, employee portals, and corporate intranets that can be further enhanced by artificial intelligence and analytics features.
The recent Wizdom acquisition was priced at only 3.5x recurring revenue, has cashflow breakeven in sight and achieved more than 230% growth over the year to December 2018 in annualised recurring revenue.
Foolish takeaway
All of theses small cap ASX tech shares have very promising futures and it's easy to get excited about the potential of each, although of course there are significant risks with each company as well.
Out of the four I'm probably attracted to the idea of Livetiles the most due to its impressive revenue growth and partnership with Microsoft.
