You probably have not heard of them, but Cass Information Systems (CASS) is crucial to many companies, asserts leading growth stock expert Eddy Elfenbein, editor of Growth Stock Advisor.
Cass is a business services company based in St. Louis, Missouri. The company processes and pays 66 million invoices each year. It wants to pay your company's bills.
The information services firm provides freight payment and information processing services to large manufacturing, distribution, and retail companies across the United States.
Its offerings include freight bill payment, audit, and rating services, as well as outsourcing of utility bill processing and payments. Its telecommunications division manages telecom expenses for large companies. Cass grew out of Cass Commercial Bank (now a subsidiary), which provides banking services to private companies.
The company’s international reach is truly impressive. Cass pays invoices in 185 countries and in 114 different currencies. Cass lets companies have complete visibility into every detail of their transportation spending with total trust in the data.
Cass helps save millions in telecommunications costs thanks to an expense management partner who studies the data and recommends savings initiatives. Cass helps pay utility bills reliably on time. Cass can also leverage benchmarking data for waste removal costs to negotiate new contracts. This helps save time and money.
Now here are some critical details about why I like Cass. The company has a wide operating margin. Also, Cass has zero long-term debt. Cass is also sitting on a mountain (well, small hill) of cash. At last count, it comes to $223 million. That works out to $15.36 per share.
This is important because it tells us that Cass is more efficient than it initially appears to be. Since interest rates are so low, that cash doesn’t generate much in terms of earnings. More than one-quarter of the share price is simply the bank account. Although I’m not predicting it, Cass could easily pay out a big special dividend.
