Critical Contrast: AppTech Payments (NASDAQ:APCX) vs. Intellicheck (NYSE:IDN)

AppTech Payments (NASDAQ:APCX) and Intellicheck (NYSE:IDN) are both small-cap business services companies, but which is the superior business? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their risk, valuation, institutional ownership, earnings, dividends, profitability and analyst recommendations.

Analyst Recommendations

This is a breakdown of recent ratings for AppTech Payments and Intellicheck, as provided by MarketBeat.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
AppTech Payments	0	0	0	0	0.00
Intellicheck	0	1	3	0	2.75

Intellicheck has a consensus target price of $6.63, indicating a potential downside of 0.38%. Given Intellicheck’s stronger consensus rating and higher possible upside, analysts plainly believe Intellicheck is more favorable than AppTech Payments.

Volatility and Risk

AppTech Payments has a beta of -0.28, meaning that its stock price is 128% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Intellicheck has a beta of 1.17, meaning that its stock price is 17% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Earnings & Valuation

This table compares AppTech Payments and Intellicheck”s top-line revenue, earnings per share and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
AppTech Payments	$276,000.00	52.56	-$18.51 million	($0.19)	-2.18
Intellicheck	$21.97 million	6.12	-$1.98 million	$0.01	665.00

Intellicheck has higher revenue and earnings than AppTech Payments. AppTech Payments is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Intellicheck, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Profitability

This table compares AppTech Payments and Intellicheck’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
AppTech Payments	-3,119.45%	-398.98%	-153.45%
Intellicheck	-3.37%	-1.59%	-1.23%

Insider & Institutional Ownership

5.2% of AppTech Payments shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 42.8% of Intellicheck shares are held by institutional investors. 37.9% of AppTech Payments shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 6.9% of Intellicheck shares are held by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Summary

Intellicheck beats AppTech Payments on 11 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.

About AppTech Payments

AppTech Payments Corp., a financial technology company, provides electronic payment processing technologies and merchant services in the United States. Its merchant transaction services offer processing payments for credit and debit cards through point-of-sale equipment, e-commerce gateways, periodic automatic clearing house payments, and gift and loyalty programs. The company also offers integrated solutions for frictionless digital and mobile payment acceptance, as well as multi-use case, multi-channel, API-driven, and account-based issuer processing for card, digital tokens, and payment transfer transaction services; hosted ecommerce checkout, a flexible payment gateway; and text payment technology, alternative payment methods (APMs), and contactless payments. In addition, it provides FinZeo, a fintech platform. The company was formerly known as AppTech Corp. AppTech Payments Corp. was incorporated in 1998 and is headquartered in Carlsbad, California.

About Intellicheck

Intellicheck, Inc., a technology company, provides on-demand digital identity validation solutions for KYC, fraud, and age verification needs in North America. The company offers solutions for digital and physical identities for financial services, fintech companies, BNPL providers, e-commerce and retail commerce businesses, law enforcement, and government agencies. It provides identity systems products, including commercial identification products, such as Intellicheck Platform, an identity solution that checks whether an ID is valid, matches the ID to the person presenting it, and provides a risk score to determine the risk of doing business with that person; IDN-Portal, an Intellicheck-branded identity validation application that provides the ability to scan an ID using a mobile phone; IDN-Portal+ that offers document validation, retail POS integration, additional data for analytics and analysis, and online validation, and other features; IDN-Direct that provides access to additional data and the ability to use the platform's Risk Score capability to help with decision-making; and Intellicheck mobile app, which provides the ability to login and scan an ID. The company also offers State Aware Software solution, which provides or restricts information that is electronically scanned from an ID based on the electronic reading laws according to the state in which the ID is scanned; data collection devices that enable its software applications to be used on a variety of commercially available credit card terminals, PDAs, tablets, laptops, desktops, mobile phones, and point-of-sale terminals; and instant credit application kiosk software applications. It serves government, military, and commercial markets. The company was formerly known as Intellicheck Mobilisa, Inc. and changed its name to Intellicheck, Inc. in May 2017. Intellicheck, Inc. was incorporated in 1994 and is headquartered in Melville, New York.