The positivity continues to flow into the FlexiGroup Limited (ASX: FXL) share price, which hit a new 52-week high this morning. FlexiGroup shares opened at $1.94 but have since shot up 2.29% and are sitting at $2.01 at the time of writing, after hitting the new 52-week high of $2.10 earlier today.
It's been a wild ride for Flexigroup shareholders – unfortunately for those who thought they saw the writing on the wall and bought in back in 2013 for $4.70, today's moves would be cold comfort. Even those who jumped in way back in 2006 – paying the then-asking price of $2.50 – well, it's been a disappointing 13 years.
Jump forward though, and Flexigroup shares are still up 52% for the year so far (having started 2019 at $1.35 a share)
Why are Flexigroup shares going ballistic?
Well, it seems it's the company's 2019 financial year earnings results (reported on 27 August) that are driving investors into a frenzy – no major company news has come out since.
Flexigroup reported an after-tax profit of $76.1 million (profits are a rare thing in the buy-now, pay-later (BNPL) space), as well as 76 million active customers, which was up 8% on the year before. Retail partners also grew by a healthy 8% to 65,000 and transaction volumes were also up 12% to $2.65 billion.
Flexigroup's flagship humm product is also doing well, reporting a 19% increase in volumes since its April launch.
In addition to these pleasing results, the company also announced new products in the lending, BNPL and credit card spaces (all with the trendiest of names): bundll, wiired money, cartt and wiired lease. Bundll is especially exciting, as it involved an extension of Flexigroup's BNPL offerings in partnership with US payments giant Mastercard.
Flexigroup has another thing going for it that other hot ASX payment companies like Afterpay Touch Group Ltd (ASX: APT) and Zip Co Ltd (ASX: Z1P) don't have: the company actually pays a dividend – and a solid one at that. In its results announcement, Flexigroup confirmed that its full-year dividend would stay steady at 7.7 cents per share, which offers a yield of 3.74% on current prices.
Foolish takeaway
It seems things are looking up for this payments company – all the numbers are trending the right way after all. I personally would like to see some further consolidation for the company in this space before considering an investment though – it is very crowded after all.
