Universal Gains Boost Payments Stocks

The payments industry saw small but meaningful growth across all of its subsets this week as its stock market value increased by 1.31 percent.

The remittance industry had the strongest week of any payments subset, growing 3.47 percent on the backs of gains from both MoneyGram International and Western Union alike. MoneyGram continued its monthly ascent by gaining 4.65 percent to reach $17.34 per share, while Western Union reached a per-share price of $14.63 after gaining 2.59 percent.

Green Dot finished as the biggest individual winner of the week, jumping 7.90 percent to hit $15.30 a share as it continues its steady climb since November 2012. That helped boost the prepaid industry by .90 percent, as the industry’s growth was partially slowed by a -0.38 percent drop in value from NetSpend Holdings.

Net 1 UEPS Technologies finished with the second-strongest individual performance, jumping 7.16 percent to hit $6.14 after trending downward for the better part of three weeks. Discover Financial Services, VeriFone Systems and MoneyGram rounded out the top five performers of the week, each finishing with gains of over 4 percent.

The network industry saw the second-biggest gain by payments subset on the week, jumping 1.75 percent. Discover led the way with a 5.86 percent boost with American Express following at a 3.74 percent jump. MasterCard placed third among networks with growth of 2.11 percent, and Visa brought up the rear with what was still a positive week, gaining 1.64 percent.

The worst performance of the week went to Heartland Payment Systems, which dropped -6.39 percent to fall to $29.60: close to the dead middle of its 52 week range. Fellow Acquirer/Processor Global Payments Inc. finished with a more tolerable -1.39 loss, but still registered as our second-worst performer.