How Toast, IBD Stock Of The Day, Is Changing Restaurant Business With AI Software
Toast, a provider of restaurant software, is IBD Stock Of The Day amid its ongoing bounce off the 21-day exponential moving average. Toast stock has advanced 18% in 2025, outperforming rivals. Toast stock holds an entry point of 43.47, Tuesday's intraday high.
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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
How Toast, IBD Stock Of The Day, Is Changing Restaurant Business With AI Software
Toast, a provider of restaurant software, is IBD Stock Of The Day amid its ongoing bounce off the 21-day exponential moving average. Toast stock has advanced 18% in 2025, outperforming rivals. Toast stock holds an entry point of 43.47, Tuesday's intraday high.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
Payments firms account for bulk of fintech revenue
This story was originally published on Banking Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Banking Dive newsletter. Fewer than 100 of the approximately 37,000 fintech companies globally account for roughly 60% of industry revenue – and payments firms are the 'indisputable winner' of the realm to date, accounting for more than half of that success. Of the $378 billion in global fintech revenues in 2024, $126 billion came from payments fintechs, some of which have seen growth from digital wallets (like PayPal and ApplePay) or vertical software-as-a-service (like Stripe, Toast and Square), according to a report released Monday by QED Investors and Boston Consulting Group. 'Companies like Stripe and Adyen and Square really filled the gap when there was a shift to [e-commerce] and mobile commerce. They were able to just win that race and grab market share,' explained Laura Bock, QED partner and one of the authors of the report, 'Fintech's Next Chapter: Scaled Winners and Emerging Disruptors.' 'What we talk a lot about, and think a lot about, is how financial services lives downstream of the real economy,' she said. 'When there are shifts in how the real economy works, that's a huge opening for fintech to make waves.' While fintech accounted for just 3% of overall banking and insurance revenues in 2024 ($12.7 trillion, according to the report), fintech revenues surged 21%, compared to the 6% growth rate of incumbent banks. In recent years, embedded payments has revolutionized how consumers and merchants transact for certain things, Bock explained – for their fitness classes, as with MindBody, or their dinner, as with Toast. Artificial intelligence presents the possibility of another major shift, she noted, this time due to agentic payments. 'For example, I use ChatGPT for way too much,' Bock said. 'Yesterday, I was trying to figure out where to go on my honeymoon … so I was asking it 'what's the weather in Italy in September? Which part should I go to? What should I book?' You can have it generate an entire itinerary. Imagine that I could then just say, 'Hey, I like this plan, book it.'' 'I've connected [it] to my wallet or my card, I've given [it] the appropriate permissions. Maybe I say, 'don't spend $500 without asking me,' but I sign off on it, and it books my hotels, my activities, my flight. I don't think it's crazy that a bot [will be] your travel agent, and that it just uses your card or ChatGPT wallet to make payments,' Bock said. 'I think that will become more mainstream, maybe not like in a year or two, but at some point over the next five or so years.' Before AI agents are granted the ability to make payments, though, proper guardrails must be built to verify that the agent is acting on behalf of a person, and within the boundaries permitted by the person. Current regulatory frameworks are designed with human actors and institutions in mind, noted QED and BCG in their report; with AI agents, questions arise regarding authentication, fraud prevention, and liability. 'Say my bot goes rogue and books me in first class when I didn't want to pay for it. What happens now? Am I the one arguing with Delta?' Bock said to Banking Dive. 'Every time there's a change with how payments are made, a whole new set of infrastructure needs to jump up to support it.' Privacy and data security also pose challenges for agentic AI, according to the report, as data incidents can be devastating both financially and reputationally. 'This is where regulators will need to provide clarity and guidance,' the report said. 'Given these challenges, the use of agentic AI in financial services may lag other sectors of the economy. Nonetheless, we are already beginning to see its transformational potential in software development, particularly for earlier-stage, AI-native fintechs.' Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Yahoo
2 Brilliant Stocks to Buy With $100 and Hold for 5 Years
Intel's focus on aggressive cost-cutting and edge AI help position it as a turnaround story. Toast is improving its revenue mix and increasing client adoption of its AI-powered tools. 10 stocks we like better than Intel › The U.S. equity markets have been quite turbulent in 2025, affected by escalating geopolitical pressures, protectionist tariffs, and high interest rates. Not surprisingly, investors are shying away from high-growth, high-risk stocks and moving toward defensive plays. Yet, this period of volatility also offers long-term investors an opportunity to buy exceptional stocks at reasonable prices. All that is needed is a modest sum of $100, not required to pay for immediate needs. Buying even one of these two fundamentally strong businesses below can position you on a multi-year growth trajectory. Here's why. Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC) recent earnings performance for the first quarter was mixed. While revenue and earnings surpassed consensus estimates, investors were disappointed by the company's weak guidance for the second quarter of fiscal 2025. Despite this, many factors are working in Intel's favor, especially with the company hiring Lip-Bu Tan, who's credited with the turnaround of Cadence Design Systems, as its new CEO. The company has plans to aggressively reduce operating expenses to $17 billion in fiscal 2025, $500 million lower than the previous estimate, and to $16 billion in fiscal 2026. Intel also focuses on better asset utilization to reduce capital expenditures (capex) from the last estimate of $20 billion to $18 billion. Beyond cost savings, Intel is also gearing up to become a significant beneficiary of the ongoing AI revolution. While Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are ahead in the AI race, Intel is now developing full-stack AI solutions to enable the next wave of AI-powered computing. The company aims to improve accuracy, power efficiency, and security in running next-generation enterprise workloads such as reasoning models, physical AI, and agentic AI. Intel is also focusing on the edge AI market, which is estimated to grow from $53.5 billion in 2025 to $82 billion in 2030. Gartner expects half of the enterprise-managed data to be processed outside data centers or the cloud, in manufacturing plants, retail outlets, and healthcare facilities. These applications require low power and efficient architectures in areas where the company has excelled. Intel's 18A manufacturing process technology has also become a significant competitive advantage, thanks to its higher performance and improved power efficiency. With this technology, the company has built an AI PC client processor called Panther Lake and a server processor called Clearwater Forest. By demonstrating successful "booting of operating systems without additional configurations or modifications," these processors have highlighted the strength of 18A process technology. Subsequently, Intel Foundry has now emerged as an underappreciated asset in the company's portfolio. It's added two companies in the defense industry, while industry reports claim that Amazon and Microsoft are also exploring partnerships for 18A capabilities. Furthermore, Intel Foundry also engages with customers for Intel 14A process technology (a successor to 18A). Intel shares are trading 1.7 times sales, lower than their five-year average of 2.3. Hence, considering the company's many tailwinds and bargain valuation, the stock appears a smart buy now. In the past few years, Toast (NYSE: TOST) has transformed itself from a basic mobile payment application company into a complete operating system for the restaurant industry, including kitchen operations, restaurant and menu services, inventory tracking, payment processing, multilocation management, customer engagement, and data analytics. Toast currently serves 140,000 restaurant locations in the U.S., only 10% of the 1.4 million locations across its customer segments. While the company's current stronghold is in the U.S. small-to-medium-sized business market, management also focuses on enterprise customers, food and beverage retail, and international market clients. This indicates massive room for growth in the existing markets. Toast has leveraged advanced AI-powered technologies to boost average order volume and ensure effective advertising. The company has launched an AI engine, ToastIQ, which combines AI, restaurant expertise, and proprietary data. ToastIQ's features help clients with business insights, troubleshooting, marketing, employee scheduling, and pricing. The company's recent financial and operational performance for the first quarter has been impressive. Revenue was up 24.4% year over year to $1.34 billion, while operating income was $43 million, a dramatic improvement from the $56 million loss in the same period last year. Subscription revenue increased by 38% to $209 million. This shift toward more visible, sticky, and higher-margin subscription revenues is a positive. The company also reported free cash flows of $69 million -- an impressive feat, since the first quarter is typically the seasonally weakest. Toast added over 6,000 net new locations to reach approximately 140,000 total locations in the first quarter. This also included major enterprise wins, which are strong positives, as they usually demonstrate significant annual recurring revenues and lower churn rates. Toast trades at about 5 times sales, higher than its three-year average of 3.8. Although the valuation may appear expensive, it seems justified for a company with a huge addressable market, strong financial and operational metrics, and a broad customer base. Hence, the stock looks like a worthwhile buy now. Before you buy stock in Intel, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Intel wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $653,389!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $830,492!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 982% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 171% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of May 19, 2025 John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Manali Pradhan has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Amazon, Cadence Design Systems, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Toast. The Motley Fool recommends Gartner and recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft, short August 2025 $24 calls on Intel, and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. 2 Brilliant Stocks to Buy With $100 and Hold for 5 Years was originally published by The Motley Fool
