"Do you have any statistics to supplement the argument in case? (I.e that US consumers of professional services tend to use cheques as a preferred payment type?)."
No, sorry Re.. Baggedem, I don't have hard stats; more a case of like I know Americans still like to use lots of cheques just like I know that Americans like to eat hamburgers and watch baseball and basketball.
Apologies if that sounds a bit facetious, but I can't remember where I actually came across official numbers (I recall reading a report published by a group of economists at the US Federal Reserve, I think).
But I hope I haven't over-represented this dynamic; I'm not trying to say that most Americans still use only cheques; its actually a small minority of them and - not unexpectedly - it has been declining over time.
But there are trillions of payment transactions that get made in the US every year, so even just a small proportion of them being by cheque still equates to several billions of transactions; and even just a small number of those, in turn, could fall under QFE's ambit, that would still be multiples of QFE's current transaction base.
For context, for bill payments, as recently as 2017, more than 18% (so almost one-in-five) of bills were paid by cheque in the US:
According to that report, US consumers write about around 2.3 cheques each per month
Now assume, conservatively, that we are talking about 100 million active American consumers out of a population of 360m (so exclude children and the elderly).
Per year that works out to about:
100 m x (2.3 x 12) = 2.76 billion cheques per year.
Heck, let's be conservative and round that down to just 2 billion cheques per year(I think I read somewhere that the actual figure was something like 7 billion cheques in 2017... don't ask me where that figure hails from, but its what sticks in my memory banks).
At the average value of $390 per cheque, we are talking about a total opportunity set of around $780bn.
Even if QFE is able to participate in a mere 0.5% of that opportunity (so not 10% of it, not even 1%, but a mere half of 1%), it would mean a transaction value of around $4.0bn which is more than a 5-fold uplift from the company's current transactional value level of around $0.7bn .
Make no mistake, the potential revenue pie is large.
All that is required is for some execution, something that was prevented due to Covid and the monetary and fiscal responses to it by governments.
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QFE Price at posting:
22.5¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)