Payments Stocks See Big Jump Behind Remittance, POS Industries

The payments industry saw one of its best performances of the year on the stock market this week, as the industry as a whole jumped 2.20 percent behind impressive growth from the remittance, POS equipment and network industries.

NCR Corporation had the strongest week of any individual company in our index, jumping 12.43 percent to reach $29.84 per share. The jumps came after NCR tripled its Q1 2013 profit from a year earlier, beating analyst estimates and providing revised estimates for EPS for the year.

Green Dot finished with our second-best performance, growing 12 percent to hit $17.83. Similarly to NCR Corp, Green Dot benefit from a positive Q1 2013 report that led analysts to revaluate its stock worth.

Bottomline Technologies rounded out our top three performers, and now sits at $28.27 after a $11.56. The company reported larger losses but higher EPS than analysts anticipated.

The remittance industry had the strongest performance of any industry subset on the week, growing 7.38 percent. MoneyGram International led the subset with a jump of 8.35 percent, while Western Union followed close behind at 7.27 percent.

The POS equipment subset was our second-best performing industry growing 6.39 percent, while the network industry came in third at 5.00 percent.

Among networks, Visa placed first with a 7.36 percent jump to $179.54. Discover came in next at 4.58 percent at 45.93. American Express and MasterCard saw similar results, rising 3.66 percent and 3.40 percent, respectively. Visa and MasterCard both released their earnings last week.

The only two companies on our index to finish in the red were ACI Worldwide and Fiserv. ACI dropped -1.27 percent to hit $45.84 after a mixed earnings report. Fiserv dropped to $86.80 for a fall of -3.69 percent after some analysts dropped its rating following quarterly reports.

Blackhawk Networks grew 1.9 percent over its second week on the index, ending at a price of $24.18.