Dividends Are Found in the Tried & True

I got the weirdest email on Monday: No, thanks. I absolutely do not want to start banking with a social media company. Elon Musk has been touting the idea of X Money since he took over Twitter back in 2022 and it is finally a reality… kind of. X Money is actually a payments feature built into the X app. Behind the scene it is a partnership with FDIC-backed Cross River Bank and Visa. On the surface, it looks like it wants to compete with Venmo, CashApp, or PayPal, which have already solidified their positions in this market. I am fascinated with the peer-to-peer (P2P) payment app market. Venmo leaned into making bill pay a more social experience using friends, feeds, and cute emojis. You know a service is popular when its name gets “verbed.” To “Venmo” someone means to send them money, just as to “Google” something means to do an internet search. CashApp was always a little more serious or business-y to me. It was acquired by Block Inc. (formerly Square), a payment processor used by small businesses. Then there’s PayPal, which is generally accepted almost anywhere you shop online. Competing with PayPal might be the most interesting part of the story. Elon Musk had an online banking and financial services startup called X.com back in 1999. It merged with a company called Confinity who owned PayPal. He was briefly the CEO of the combined company, but was unsurprisingly ousted by the board over a dispute. Two years later the company was bought by eBay, handing Musk the money he needed to launch Tesla and SpaceX.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here by saying X Money is not the future of banking. I have been following new trends in banking closely because I think there will be some new dividend payers popping up soon. There’s no doubt how we handle money has changed radically over the years. Apps allow for most banking to be done directly from your smartphone. Those P2P services mentioned above let you send payments quickly from person to person. There’s also the rise of online-only banks and neobanks, which are not licensed banks and partner with FDIC-insured banks. Both are mobile-app-centric financial solutions. They offer low or zero fees by eliminating the overhead of physical branch locations. I like the idea of passing on the cost savings to the customer… but I’d be even more interested if they used some of that saving to pay a dividend. SoFi Technologies (SOFI) is a nationally chartered FDIC-insured financial institution with no physical locations. It started publicly trading in 2021 through a SPAC reverse merger. For the second quarter, it reported record adjusted net revenue of $1.2 billion, up 40% year over year. Member growth was up 35% to a record 15.8 million. Chime Financial (CHYM) is a fintech platform that offers digital banking through a network of partner banks. It was founded back in 2012 but only went public last year. Its second-quarter revenue hit $670 million, up 27% year over year. Active members grew 20% hitting 10.4 million. Neither pay a dividend because they are in the growth phase, but both are on my watch list. If this becomes the preferred future of banking, dividends will follow. Until then, we’ll have to find our banking dividends in conventional players with physical branches. Tried and True Is the Way to Go The big names in traditional banks have seen their shares run higher over the past few years, squashing their dividend yields. To hit my 3.5% minimum yield, I instead look at regional banks. Here are two on my radar. Columbia Banking Systems (COLB) has branches in the seven most Western states plus Colorado and Texas. While most major banks are closing retail locations, COLB opened a branch in Colorado Springs and a financial hub in Las Vegas in the second quarter. It has $65 billion in assets and a tangible book value per share of $19.22. Earnings per share (EPS) f...