3 Dividend Stocks With Recurring Revenue and Room to Keep Raising Payouts
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Information businesses that sell data professionals can’t work without tend to collect cash like a toll road. Customers renew, prices drift higher, and capital needs stay light. Three of them, Thomson Reuters (NASDAQ:TRI | TRI Price Prediction), VeriSign (NASDAQ:VRSN), and OneSpan (NASDAQ:OSPN), each raised its quarterly dividend over the past year, and all three cover those payouts from earnings. The timing matters. The first upcoming ex-dividend date is November 13. The ex-dividend date is the deadline: you have to own shares before it to collect the next payment.
Thomson Reuters: Legal and Tax Data With a Payout That Keeps Climbing
Thomson Reuters yields 2.37%. It pays $0.655 per quarter, up from $0.595 a year earlier. The company raised its annualized dividend 10% to $2.62 in February. The next payment goes to shareholders of record on November 18, which is also the ex-dividend date, with cash arriving December 10.
Dividend safety: The payout ratio is 78.8%, so earnings cover the dividend, but with less spare room than the other two names here. Free cash flow gives more comfort. The company is guiding to roughly $2.1B of free cash flow for the year, and CFO Gary Bischoping told analysts on the earnings call, “We remain committed to delivering 75% of our free cash flow back to shareholders via returns of capital.” Leverage stood at one time as of September 30, and the company held $1.394B in cash against $11.224B of shareholders’ equity. On the same day this article was written, the company announced a new $500 million share buyback plan, suggesting cash remains ample after the dividend.
The company has a long history of payments. Quarterly dividend records go back to 2002, and the regular quarterly rate has grown every year since 2019, from $0.36 to today’s $0.655. One note for income planning: the $1.435518 per-share distribution with a May ex-date was a one-time item. It is not part of the regular dividend, so don’t count on it happening again.
Bull case: Lawyers, accountants, and corporate tax departments build their daily work around Westlaw, Checkpoint, and CoCounsel. Recurring revenue rose 9% and makes up 88% of total revenue. Organic revenue grew 10% in the third quarter. AI is pulling customers deeper into the platform: GenAI-enabled products made up 34% of annualized contract value, compared with 24% a year ago. CEO Steve Hasker put it: “AI expands our TAMs.” The stock trades at about 23 times forward earnings.
Risk: At a 78.8% payout ratio, future raises have to come mostly from earnings growth, because the ratio itself has little room left to expand. Third-quarter free cash flow also fell to $408 million from $526 million a year earlier, and management says it will keep spending heavily on AI products.
VeriSign: A Young Dividend Riding the .com Toll Road
VeriSign yields 1.05%, the lowest of the three. Its quarterly dividend rose to $0.81 from $0.77. The ex-dividend date is November 17, and payment follows on November 24.
Dividend safety: The payout ratio is 34.4%, which leaves plenty of room. Third-quarter free cash flow came in at $261 million, and the quarter ended with $476 million in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities. The dividend is young. VeriSign started regular quarterly payments in 2025, so its record of raises is short. Management sounds committed, though: “VeriSign intends to continue to pay a cash dividend on a quarterly basis.” Shareholders’ equity is negative at -$2.2847B. That figure comes from years of share buybacks and doesn’t point to operating trouble. CEO Jim Bidzos added on the call, “We achieved our goal of earning investment-grade status in 2021, and we intend to maintain it.”
Bull case: VeriSign is the sole registry operator for .com and .net, so a slice of nearly every website’s domain fee passes through it. The .com and .net base grew 6.1% to 182.5M names. New registrations reached 13.1M, up from 10.6M a year earlier. The trailing operating margin is 68.6%. The .web domain adds a new revenue source, with its sunrise period planned for mid-December. Over the last 12 months, the company returned $1.14 billion to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. Shares trade at about 28 times forward earnings.
Risk: Returning so much cash has left the company highly leveraged. Total liabilities of $3.5648B exceed total assets of $1.2801B, and quarterly interest expense rose to $21.2M from $18.9M.
OneSpan: Identity Security With the Widest Coverage Cushion
OneSpan yields 2.41%, the highest of the three. Its quarterly dividend rose to $0.13 from $0.12. It goes ex-dividend first, on November 13, and pays on December 4.
Dividend safety: The payout ratio of 28.9% is the lowest in this group. The dividend cost $4.8 million last quarter, while operating cash flow came in at $16.5 million. OneSpan ended the quarter with $51.4 million in cash and $5 million drawn on its credit facility, and it repaid that balance after quarter end. This dividend is also young: the first payment was declared in December 2024 and paid in early 2025. Since the start of last year, the company has returned $55 million via dividends and share buybacks.
Bull case: Banks rely on OneSpan’s Digipass authentication and OneSpan Sign agreements to secure logins and transactions, and switching providers is painful. Subscriptions now make up 81% of revenue. Annual recurring revenue rose 8.5% to $195.5 million, net retention reached 105%, and gross retention was 91%. Management raised full-year guidance to $254 million to $258 million in revenue and $72 million to $76 million in adjusted EBITDA. CEO Victor Limongelli said, “Most of our growth comes from existing customers, which is why our strategy is to add value, add products, and have more to sell them.” The stock trades at about 13 times trailing earnings, the cheapest multiple in this group.
Risk: OneSpan is a small company, with a market cap of $817,219,820, and its beta of 1.494 means the share price moves far more than the other two. Hardware token shipments also come in uneven batches, which can make individual quarters volatile.
Three Toll Roads, Three Rising Paychecks
Each of these companies sells data that customers renew almost by default, and each turned that recurring cash into a larger dividend this year. Thomson Reuters has the longest payment record and the tightest coverage. VeriSign has the strongest margins, coupled with the most leveraged balance sheet. OneSpan offers the most coverage room and the cheapest valuation. Combining names like these is how you build a ladder that pays the bills without ever selling the shares, which is the whole exercise in our free dividend ladder guide: Never Touch the Principal. With ex-dividend dates on November 13, 17, and 18, income investors have a short window to research all three before the next round of payments locks in.
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Chris Lange is a financial and geopolitical writer with more than a decade of experience covering a myriad of topics. He has published thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St., with past coverage focused heavily on stocks, IPOs, healthcare, defense, global affairs, and technology.
His work has been quoted, or referenced by a number of outlets including Business Insider, USA Today, Yahoo Finance, MSN, The Motley Fool, and many other publications. A graduate of Southwestern University, he studied business with a focus on investments and has previous experience in banking and startups.
When not reading or writing the news, he is following his passion for Lacrosse, playing chess, or building solar projects with his dad.
