Beyond Afterpay, who are the next ASX fintech dazzlers?

By Tim Boreham, Editor of New Criterion

The $39 billion takeover offer for Afterpay (ASX: APT) highlights the stupendous potential of our home-grown digital-oriented fintech minnows, bearing in mind the towering buy-now-pay later (BNPL) oak tree was a mere acorn five years ago.

Naturally, investor attention has turned to the slew of listed BNPL wannabes who are emulating the Afterpay model with various degrees of success.

But BNPL is a crowded field and valuations are arguably “toppish,” such as the $4.35 billion valuation ascribed to the next biggest ASX listed player, Zip Co (ASX: Z1P).

At the next level down, largely subscale providers will be competing with not only the likes of PayPal but with Afterpay’s bolstered firepower under the likely ownership of the $167 billion market cap, NASDAQ-listed Square.

(As far as we know, the scrip deal won’t be done in four interest-free fortnightly instalments) .

Investors casting their net a little wider in the ASX fintech milieu may have caught a glimpse of aggressive digital payments platform Novatti Group (ASX: NOV),which has bolstered its war chest with a $40 million share placement.

Novatti is aggressively expanding in the lucrative – albeit arcane – field of online business-to-business payments. The company also expects a long-delayed restricted banking licence to be granted before the year is out.

As with the BNPL brigade, Novatti seeks to capture a slice of the fee stream behind every digital transaction.

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Source: Beyond Afterpay, who are the next ASX fintech dazzlers? – Tim Boreham | Livewire