Buy This Quiet Financial Titan at a Discount Price
Each spring brings with it a deluge of large white envelopes delivered to investors’ doors. Inside are proxy statements and often glossy annual reports or chairman’s letters. That humble proxy statement is a slice of capitalism distilled into paper form
Keeping the markets running smoothly with things such as proxy voting requires all sorts of behind-the-scenes technology we rarely see. The dominant company driving that technology—including replacing those overstuffed envelopes with encrypted data signals—is Broadridge Financial Solutions (NYSE: BR).
And the financial services industry definitely needs technological advances. Heavy regulation, though, has kept many would-be innovators at bay, and financial upstarts have a tough time gaining early traction. It’s no surprise that change has been slow.
Not so for Broadridge, which has four major advantages over most aspiring financial tech firms:
Market dominance. With over 80% market share, Broadridge needs to spend zero resources fending off competitors.
A stable, growing core business. The company throws off huge amounts of cash that can be reinvested in the technologies driving the next wave of innovation.
Regulator love. It handles complex regulatory tasks on behalf of thousands of corporate and industry customers.
Customer Base. Broadridge’s customers are businesses, not individual consumers. Bringing a new technology product to a business customer is far easier than convincing Uncle Eddie to use a new PayPal-like app.
Broadridge, then, is a sort of benevolent monopolist, well-positioned to improve the vast technological infrastructure underpinning the modern financial services industry.
Boring Is Beautiful
Broadridge has fingers in a broad swatch of the financial industry plumbing but got its start in proxy statements. Companies that need to deliver proxies, which includes every publicly traded company every year, jump at the chance to offload that job to a trusted partner. Broadridge is the choice, handling 50% of the world’s proxies, over 80% of them in the United States. The company created ProxyEdge, a suite of technology that runs the proxy process with extraordinary efficiency, including linking in with hundreds of custodians in real time. It’s no wonder Broadridge is hired to handle over 2 billion shareholder communications annually.
Broadridge dominates more than the proxy market. Over the years, the company has weaved its way into nearly every corner of the vast technical infrastructure underlying the financial services industry, even processing stock and bond market trades.
With such a virtual monopoly, surely growth must be limited, right? Quite the opposite. Broadridge’s market is growing. The number of shareholders, the number of dollars they control, and the number of companies in which they invest are all growing steadily.
But the real growth opportunity comes from innovation. Broadridge cranks out dozens of bite-size innovations and incremental technological improvements every year. It is also constantly scouting for new technical upstarts to buy.
Not that the company doesn’t undertake larger and long-term projects. Last quarter, CEO Rich Daly announced plans to incorporate blockchain technology, a shared ledger for digital currency transactions. Blockchain technology is so advanced that you hear about it more in academic think tanks. Broadridge’s willingness to be the first to market with the technology (they bought a blockchain startup to jumpstart the process) shows the $7 billion company’s dedication to continuous disruption.
Why now?
Broadridge’s stock never looks cheap. I’ve followed the company since late 2010, and at no point in those six years—not at $25, $50 or today’s $65 per share—did the stock ever appear undervalued. Yet shares are up 205% in that time, far outstripping the S&P 500’s 80% gain.
Investors consistently make this mistake with dominant companies growing strongly but not explosively. Upset by the lack of a narrative that leads to a 100% gain in 12 months, investors miss Broadridge’s ability to compound value at far-above-market rates for years and decades to come.
That’s exactly what I expect: consistent 7% to 8% revenue growth translating into 10% to 20% earnings growth for many years to come. I also expect the company to continue to gush cash (over $400 million last year), make disciplined investments and small tuck-in acquisitions, use debt conservatively and strategically, and returns gobs of excess cash to shareholders through dividends (it currently yields almost %) and share repurchases.
The Time Is Now
That said, Broadridge is my top pick this month for timely reasons. A quick look at its stock chart, normally straight up and to the right, shows the stock has come down a bit off its all-time highs earlier this year. There are three reasons, all temporary.
To start, fund flows—the amount of money changing hands in the market—are down slightly this year. This is normal; fund flows are highly seasonal.
Also, fund flows are down in part due to new Department of Labor laws that may dramatically change how many brokers and financial advisors do business. Adding to the uncertainty, much of the rhetoric President-elect Donald Trump spouted on the campaign trail suggests he may roll them back. In this awkward interim, financial advisors are reluctant to invest clients in new funds. Those trades will happen; they’re just delayed, likely until next year.
Finally, TD Ameritrade’s announced acquisition of Scottrade weighed on Broadridge’s stock. Both brokers are Broadridge customers, and investors feared their merger would mean the loss of one as a customer. This misunderstands the nature of Broadridge’s services, which hinge more on the number of trades or individual clients than anything else. Further, as CEO John Daly explained on the most recent conference call, Broadridge’s contract with Scottrade has clauses that make Broadridge whole in the event of a takeover, and any effect wouldn’t show up until 2019 at the earliest.
So the company has a near monopoly in a growing industry, keeps its edge through technology, and is bargain priced.
Buy Broadridge below $70 a share.
Alex Pape, CFA, manages accounts for clients who own shares of Broadridge Financial.
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