Every year big-4 auditor and management consultant Deloitte Australia names the 50 fastest growing technology businesses it knows in Australia, with some interesting insights as to where smart investors should look to generate the biggest returns on the share market.
According to Deloitte in the technology sector companies in the following three sub-sectors are performing best; healthcare, fintech, and education.
Of the 50 companies named this year 26% were listed and 74% privately held, with many of those held privately likely to come to the initial public offer stage over the next few years.
In total 24%, or nearly a quarter, of the companies on the list were in the "fintech" space.
Deloitte's rankings are based on percentage revenue growth over the past three years (2016-2018) with the higher the better, so let's take a look at the best-performing listed fintech companies.
AfterPay Touch Group Ltd (ASX: APT) will be familiar to many ASX investors as the buy-now-pay-later start-up has delivered an impressive 8,134% revenue growth over the past three years. The stock has also more than quadrupled since June 30 2017 to sell for $12.89 today. AfterPay won't keep up its historical revenue growth rates up, but it still might be a huge success.
Zip Co. Ltd (ASX: Z1P) is ranked number 5 by Deloitte with 3-year revenue growth of 1,245%. Zip Co is another buy-now-pay-later business that competes directly with AfterPay. It posted cash from operations of close to $2.5 million for the quarter ending September 30, 2018. As an interest free "credit card" disruptor it may also have a lot of growth ahead of it.
Strictly speaking these are the only two pure fintech listed businesses on the list, although there are plenty of others that are unlisted that may IPO soon.
In particular the business lending space is still growing fast as the likes of Prospa (308% revenue growth) and Lendi (100% revenue growth) again appear on the list as established startups in this space reportedly looking to go public themselves in the years ahead.
