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Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
5 Stocks To Watch For Great Dividend Growth
Coins arranged as a bar chart with a graph line above ADP showed us that the private sector is now shedding jobs. That's bad for workers—but it's great news for earnings season (and dividend growth stocks!). Slowing employment means easing wage pressures and lower inflation. It also brings better profit margins and, our favorite of all, dividend hikes. Let's talk about five firms that recently raised their payouts 25% to 400% Are these one-hit wonders or will AI-driven savings make these dividend hike sequels even better? Profit growth brings dividend growth. Which then translates to share-price gains. That's the idea behind my 'Dividend Magnet' strategy. When a company announces that it's going to pay more for the foreseeable future, it's a bold statement. More dividends opens the floodgates to more investors. Let's consider Visa (V). Everyone knows Visa for its nonstop gains—but let's not overlook its steadily rising divvie. Visa Magnet I frequently refer to these kinds of stocks as 'Hidden Yields' because they won't always wow us with their headline yields—Visa, for instance, yields less than 1% right now. But if we own these dividend stocks for years, our yields on cost can easily soar into the high-single and even double-digits. This payout potential is why I have my popcorn ready for earnings season. Let's visit five dynamic dividend growers that improved their payouts by 25% to 400% last year. Fresh dividend announcements are likely over the next few months. Dividend Growth Stock #1: T-Mobile US (TMUS) T-Mobile US (TMUS) merged with Sprint in 2020, putting it on more even footing with rivals AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ). But we could argue it only really joined 'Big Telecom' a few years later, in 2023, when it unveiled a brand-new dividend program. TMUS keeps growing. The Sprint merger (and the spectrum assets that came along with it) allowed TMUS to build a more competitive 5G network, which has translated into big jumps in new wireless subscribers, as well as big gains for T-Mobile shares. T-Mobile has also been expanding its margins and free cash flow, which has so far translated into better things for dividend investors. A year after its dividend initiation, TMUS announced a 35% dividend raise to 88 cents per share. T-Mobile is still in growth mode. Last year, the company entered a pair of joint ventures in an apparent future play on fiber telecom. Not to mention, like the other telcos, T-Mobile will have to keep plowing cash into maintaining and innovating its communications infrastructure. But we'll likely get another important data point on how aggressive TMUS wants to be with its dividend come mid-September, which is right around when the company made its previous two dividend splashes. Dividend Growth Stock #2: Amphenol (APH) Amphenol (APH) isn't nearly the household name that T-Mobile is, but it's giving dividend investors plenty to talk about. Amphenol dates back to 1932, when founder Arthur J. Schmitt produced a tube socket for radio tubes. Today, the company designs, makes and sells electrical, electronic and fiber optic connectors across three segments: Harsh Environment Solutions, Communications Solutions, and Interconnect and Sensor Systems. It's a global leader in broadband communication products for video and data networks, it provides high-performance interconnect systems for defense firms, it supplies sensors and antennas to the automotive industry, and more—so while we might not see the name around the house, chances are Amphenol powers some part of our day. The company has been a font of growth for decades because of its products' vast array of applications, which in recent years has included artificial intelligence. In Q1 2025, for instance, total orders jumped by nearly 60% year-over-year, driven heavily by AI. Indeed, the company says it will continue an elevated pace of capital expenditures 'to support the significant growth we are experiencing related to artificial intelligence applications in our IT datacom market.' This growth has been reflected in APH shares for years, but it's also starting to pour out into Amphenol's dividend, which dates back to 2005. Last year, the company juiced its payout by 50%—one of the biggest raises it has ever authorized. We'll likely get an answer to whether Amphenol plans to keep its foot on the pedal for another year in late July. Dividend Growth Stock #3: California Resources (CRC) California Resources (CRC) is a mid-cap energy E&P firm that was spun off of Occidental Petroleum (OXY) in 2014. The traditional business, which focuses on crude oil, natural gas and natural gas liquids (NGLs), includes wells in five of the largest California oil fields. However, over the past few years, CRC has leaned into green-energy initiatives such as direct air capture, and carbon capture and storage—largely through its Carbon TerraVault joint venture. CRC filed for (and emerged from) bankruptcy in 2021, and it's been profitable ever since. It initiated a 17-cent-per-share quarterly distribution that has since jumped by 128%, including a 25% improvement last year. CRC shares have more than tripled since relisting—not quite as impressive a feat as it sounds, as they've largely just tracked the energy sector, which was rebounding from Covid lows. But I'm interested in CRC's dividend direction given the size of the current payout, which is also in line with the sector. The company could taper out after its big 2024 hike—or it could signal a more aggressive plan for its cash. Like with Amphenol, California Resources previously had announced dividend increases later in the year but delivered the news earlier in 2024—in CRC's case, early August. So that's when I'll be keeping an eye out for CRC dividend news. Dividend Growth Stock #4: RLJ Lodging Trust (RLJ) RLJ Lodging Trust's (RLJ) is a hotel real estate investment trust (REIT) whose properties host 'premium-branded, rooms-oriented, high-margin, focused-service and compact full-service hotels located within the heart of demand locations.' Hoteliers love their jargon—let's cut through it. RLJ's properties contain larger hotels that offer specific, limited amenities and essentials, as well as hotels that are smaller in size but offer a wide variety of services (restaurants, bars, spas, etc.) Those 'premium' brands run the gamut, including Embassy Suites, Courtyard by Marriott, Hyatt Place, Wyndham, Residence Inn by Marriott, Hilton, and more. RLJ's dividend growth story is a familiar Covid-time tale. It and other hotel REITs were forced to raze their dividends to the ground during the pandemic, with RLJ reducing its payout from 33 cents per share down to a mere penny per quarter. It's easy to show dividend growth off of that low a platform, of course—technically speaking, after 2024's 50% hike to 15 cents per share, the dividend is 1,400% bigger than it was three years ago. It's also still half of what RLJ paid before Covid. Analysts think RLJ will earn roughly $1.40 in adjusted funds from operations (AFFO) in 2025; at current levels, that's a 40% AFFO payout ratio, which is considerably lower than many of its peers. So there's room to grow—which we can't always say about a stock that already yields 8%. Dividend Growth Stock #5: Coca-Cola Consolidated (COKE) Some rookie investors accidentally buy Coca-Cola Consolidated (COKE) instead of Coca-Cola (KO)—and what a profitable mistake! Coca-Cola Consolidated is the largest bottler of Coca-Cola in the U.S., boasting 11 manufacturing facilities, as well as 60 distribution and sales centers across the Midwest and East Coast. Those operations ship out a lot of Coke, Sprite, Dasani, Powerade and hundreds more brands and flavors to some 60 million consumers every year. While not nearly as well-known as its consumer staples partner, it has demonstrated unflinching top-line growth for the past decade-plus, including through Covid. But more noteworthy has been the bottom line: I highlighted COKE's dividend prowess back in 2023, noting it had 'quietly put up one of the more impressive five-year strings of financials you'll see' before doubling its dividend and announcing a massive $3-per-share special dividend. That didn't translate into continued dividend growth—immediately, anyway. But at the end of 2023, the company announced a massive $16-per-share special dividend to be paid in early 2024. Then in August 2024, it announced it would quintuple its regular payout to $2.50 per share. (Which, thanks to a 10-for-1 stock split in May 2025 is now 25 cents per share.) At current levels, COKE is still paying out a meager 15% of its 2024 earnings as dividends. If the company expects its past few years of profits to be the new baseline, Coca-Cola Consolidated has a lot more room to expand on that payout. The next probable announcement for such a move would be in late August, a year following its last expansion. But if not, I would look toward early December, which is when COKE previously announced special dividends and its 2023 dividend hike. Brett Owens is Chief Investment Strategist for Contrarian Outlook. For more great income ideas, get your free copy his latest special report: How to Live off Huge Monthly Dividends (up to 8.7%) — Practically Forever. Disclosure: none
Forbes
3 hours ago
- Forbes
Agentic Commerce And Payments, Money And Identity, AIs And APIs
Technicians work on the bionic humanoid robots at a workshop of Ex-Robots factory on June 23, 2025 ... More in Dalian, Liaoning Province of China (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images). At the Merchant Payments Ecosystem conference in Berlin earlier this year, I saw Simon Redfern from the Open Banking Project (the people behind the Berlin APIs for open banking in Europe) give an eye-opening presentation on Disrupting Payments with Autonomous Agents and APIs in which he explored the impact of the shift to agentic commerce on the retail payments sector. In summary: huge. Agentic Commerce Within Reach? Despite the limitations of current AI models, I think that full agentic commerce is not that far away, and to those industry observers who think that consumers might be reluctant to hand over purchasing power to, I would merely point out that swathes of the population already use agents as therapists, as life partners and as investment advisors. It is a very small step for them to use agents to make payments! Given this impending shift, I am very curious about the fintech sector's strategic response, and I found Simon's insights particularly helpful and I have been reflecting on them in the light of recent activity around payments in agentic commerce environments. Announcement's such as Mastercard's Agent Pay initiative, Visa's Intelligent Commerce, Coinbase's x402 approach and Stripe's acquisitions have brought energy and focus to a payments sector that is on the cusp of radical change. (Stripe, in particular, is embracing the scale of change. With the acquisitions of Bridge and Privy, Stripe is not simply chasing the future of payments, it is building it. By bringing to together Bridge's stablecoin payment capabilities and Privy's embedded wallet infrastructure it is developing programmable, borderless finances delivered through APIs.) Anyway, back to Berlin. Simon identified three broad categories of impact that agents will have on retail financial services. I have labelled these management, optimisation and execution, and I found them to be a useful way of organising discussions in a financial services context: Management includes analysing data to provide insight, taking care of bills and subscriptions, looking after financial health issues such as savings plans and so on; Optimisation takes care of finding the best deals, selecting payment methods based on fees & rates, obtaining rewards and scheduling payments; Execution means making bookings, obtaining tickets, subscriptions payments, tracking prices and executing purchases at the best moment, applying promotional codes and loyalty points and so on. Now, it is one thing to draw some clouds on a whiteboard, of course, and quite another to drop down a level to begin to understand how agents will achieve the variety of impacts described above. I wrote recently how the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard that enables developers to connect their data sources and AI-powered tools, will accelerate the evolution of agentic commerce (a-commerce) so I thought it might be of interest to people to show how it is used in practice by returning to Simon's live demo (I know it was live because some of it didn't work and I take my hat off to him, because I would always rather see a live demo than a canned demo) of Opey, their agent for open banking. Open is informed by open banking protocol documentation so it can understand natural language questions and respond with well-structured answers (ie, combinations of API calls that will satisfy the data and service requirements for various use cases) by following a three step process: Parse: Opey ingests Swagger-defined API endpoints, organising them into structured, retrievable documents. Identify: Using vector similarity search, Opey interprets queries and identifies the most relevant API endpoints. Execute: Opey uses tools to call the relevant APIs. Given my obsession with identity, Simon's comments on access control caught my eye. They all look like people to me. Simon made the point that existing open banking access controls operate under broad consents, whereas agentic access controls need more dynamic and granular permissions. Some examples that he gave were 'allow this agent to make travel-related payments but not other purchases' and 'this agent can only approve transactions under €500 unless I manually confirm'. He is correct, and indeed this is where the Visa, Mastercard and Paypal announcements mentioned earlier have all focussed. If you look at Visa's approach, for example, they onboard agents to their Visa Intelligent Commerce platform and then when the agent wants to make a purchase of 'their' consumers, the consumer uses a passkey to give permission and then the agent obtains a payment credential (ie, a network token) to give to the merchant. Importantly, and this is obviously one of the key roles that the networks can provide, the transaction outcome is shared with the platform in order to facilitate dispute resolution. Agentic Commerce Needs Identity The need to identify agents (whether to register them with a network or for a wide variety of other reasons) provides some amazing growth opportunities in the digital identity world and I strongly agree with the noted venture capitalists at Andreessen Horowitz who call for agents to be given a single, portable 'passport'. I might disagree with them about the need for agents to use a single passport (for privacy-related reasons I can see the agents might need multiple, non-correlatable identities) but they are right to say that there is no way to know how to pay the agent, know who the agent is working on behalf of, or trace its reputation. Agents need access to an identity infrastructure the works across all interfaces (eg, email, Slack, inter-agent and whatever). Without this infrastructure, every applications needs to rebuild the plumbing from scratch. How should we build this infrastructure? Well, why reinvent the wheel when we already know that verifiable credentials (VCs) are a viable way forward? This means new businesses springing up and I saw an article saying that one of these businesses will be granting agents access to our VCs to get stuff done on our behalf, but actually I think that's not quite right. We don't want AIs to present our verifiable credentials we want AIs to present their own verifiable credentials that we have consented to authorise. In other words, my bot shouldn't show up at a bank pretending to me: it should show up at a bank as a bot acting on my behalf. Now, this makes digital identity for bots more complicated, but also more flexible. I can safely say that the ABCs of digital identity (that is, know-your-Agent, know-your-Business and know-your-Customer) should be front and centre in the strategies of financial services organisations looking to take advantage of the shift to agentic commerce.
Business Insider
a day ago
- Business Insider
Nigerian banks resume international naira card transactions amid FX market confidence
After nearly three years of suspension, Nigerian banks have reactivated international transactions on their naira-denominated debit cards. Nigerian banks have resumed international transactions with naira-denominated debit cards after a three-year suspension. This decision reflects increased confidence in Nigeria's foreign exchange market and recent monetary policy reforms. The move is expected to relieve Nigerians relying on these cards for global payments and encourage similar actions by other banks. This significant reversal reflects growing confidence in Nigeria's foreign exchange market, the impact of monetary policy reforms, and renewed activity by Nigerian banks and bank cards in facilitating cross-border transactions. In a separate communique to customers this week, both banks confirmed the resumption of international use of their naira Mastercard and Visa cards, a move that could provide relief to millions of Nigerians who rely on these cards for global payments, subscriptions, and online purchases. United Bank for Africa (UBA) chaired by Tony Elumelu, announced that its premium naira cards, including Gold, Platinum, and World variants, can now be used internationally across ATMs, PoS machines, and online platforms. 'In line with our continued commitment to providing you with seamless and enhanced banking experiences, we are pleased to inform you that all UBA Premium Naira Cards and world variants are now enabled for international transactions, ' the statement reads 'This means you can now use your Premium Naira Card for everyday payments, online shopping, PoS, and ATM transactions across the world, with more ease and flexibility. ' UBA added. The bank's move is particularly notable given its extensive customer base across Africa and the diaspora. Industry analysts say the reactivation of naira cards signals a return of trust in the FX system and a softening of restrictions once deemed necessary to manage volatility. Wema Bank also confirmed the resumption of international access for its naira Mastercard, Visa, and ALAT cards. The bank told customers: 'Your Wema Naira Mastercard just went global! Now you can pay in dollars on all your favourite international platforms; Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Netflix, Spotify, YouTube.' Financial experts attribute this policy shift to improved FX liquidity, narrowing arbitrage margins, and recent CBN reforms. Charles Sanni, CEO of Cowry Treasurers, supports this view, noting that the appreciation of the naira, reduced interest in FX speculation, and increased diaspora remittances have all contributed to improved FX conditions. ' The spread between official and parallel market rates has thinned out, may have influenced the decision by the banks' 'The naira has also continued to appreciate against the other major currencies of the world. More so, there has been increased diaspora remittances based on the new policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on opening of accounts for non-residents, particularly Nigerians in diaspora,' Sanni added. He cited additional drivers such as improved Nigeria credit ratings, clearing of FX backlogs, geopolitical oil price boosts, and the recapitalisation of Nigerian banks. Between July 2022 and January 2023, major Nigerian banks, including GTBank, Zenith Bank, First Bank, and Standard Chartered, suspended international transactions on naira cards due to a severe FX crisis. At the time, banks such as GTBank informed customers that their naira Mastercards would no longer work for foreign online or PoS transactions, encouraging them to instead open dollar accounts. First Bank made a similar move in September 2022, stating: 'Due to current market realities on foreign exchange, you will no longer be able to use the Naira Mastercard, Naira Credit Card, our Virtual card, and Visa Prepaid Naira card for international transactions.' Fintech platforms such as Flutterwave and Eversend reportedly suspended virtual cards during the peak of the crisis. What This Means for Nigerians With UBA and Wema Bank leading the way in restoring access, pressure may now mount on other banks to follow suit, especially if FX conditions continue to improve under current policy direction.
