With the year winding down and many stocks struggling, it's time to look ahead to 2023 and think about where opportunities might lie.
Fintech is one sector that was heavily beaten down this year, as rising interest rates and concerns over a recession resulted in some investors turning their backs on the sector.
While many fintech companies were incredibly overvalued last year, I do think there are some companies that have excellent products and services that can be more resilient through the cycle and fare well long term. Here are two no-brainer fintech stocks to own in 2023.
1. Fair Isaac
Despite the carnage in the fintech space, Fair Isaac (FICO -2.77%), a decades-old company that many refer to as the original fintech, has had an outstanding year. The stock is trading up nearly 38%.
Fair Isaac is largely known for developing the three-digit FICO score that banks and other lenders rely on to make important decisions regarding whether to grant a range of different loans. This scores business generates just over half of the company's revenue and is mainly driven by originations.
I like the scores business, not because of its strong track record, but because the FICO score is used by lenders for many different kinds of loans, which makes it resilient through different kinds of environments.
For instance, the rapidly rising interest rate environment resulted in much lower mortgage originations but lots more credit card and personal loans, as consumers take on debt and consolidate debt. Scores revenue in Fair Isaac's most recent quarter was up 3% year over year.
Fair Isaac also has a software-as-a-service division that helps businesses operate more efficiently. It does this with productivity tools, machine learning capabilities, data retrieval, real-time data, and preconfigured services such as fraud prevention. Fair Isaac is putting most of these solutions onto its multiproduct analytic and decision-making FICO platform, which can be deployed into the cloud and bring together data from multiple sources and significantly enhance decision-making.
The platform seems to have found a great product market fit, with the FICO platform's annualized revenue run rate more than doubling between the end of 2020 and the end of its most recent quarter. Additionally, on the company's most recent earnings call, management guided for double-digit percentage earnings growth in its next fiscal year.
2. nCino
While it's a much newer company than Fair Isaac, nCino (NCNO -1.14%) is also a fintech company that seems to have really found products that resonate with its target customer. The company provides cloud-based tech platforms and solutions for financial institutions, which helps them run more efficiently.
These solutions include loan origination systems, which allow banks to more effectively manage the loan origination process from start to finish and automate lots of manual processes. For instance, nCino's automated spreading function helps banks locate and plug in key financial information from a borrower's financial statements into loan applications. nCino also formerly acquired the end-to-end mortgage origination platform SimpleNexus, which is being used by at least 35 of the top 100 mortgage originators.
nCino's solutions are now being used by some of the largest banks in the world, including Wells Fargo, Toronto-Dominion Bank, and Santander, and the company continues to sign big deals like the one it recently announced with Bank of New Zealand in its most recent quarter.
The company also can build a good moat because it has clients sign multiyear contracts, and it operates a land-and-expand model, meaning nCino has the ability to grow the size of its contract with clients as they use more products and services.
nCino is still losing money, but subscription revenue continues to grow each quarter, despite headwinds from a potential looming recession and banks starting to monitor expenses more closely. Long term, I do believe the company's products will be more widely used by many large banks and mortgage lenders.
