Discover Financial Services (DFS -1.40%) is slated to unveil its first-quarter results on Wednesday after the close, but on Tuesday, the financial services company let investors in on the details of its next quarterly payout.
As with the previous three distributions, the dividend will be $0.44 per share. This is to be dispensed on June 4 to stockholders of record as of May 21. At the current share price, it yields just over 5%. That is more than double the yield of payment card peer American Express, and well above the yields of both Visa and Mastercard.
Image source: Discover Financial Services.
Discover is a steady, reliable dividend payer that tends to raise its distribution every year. Since the beginning of 2012, the amount has risen from $0.10 per share to the current level. The conference call discussing the first-quarter results will take place Thursday.
According to data compiled by Yahoo! Finance, the average analyst estimate for net profit is $0.94 per share, which would be some distance from the $2.15 per share Discover earned in Q1 2019. Many banks and financial services companies have significantly ramped up their loan loss provisioning in anticipation of rising defaults. As a result, overall profitability in the sector is down sharply this earnings season.
As for Discover's top line, it's expected to improve to $2.89 billion from Q1 2019's $2.76 billion.
In early afternoon trading on Wednesday, Discover's shares were up by 1.6%, slightly lagging the gains of the main stock market indexes.
