Infosys saw business from banking clients dip 0.2% over the previous quarter compared to TCS, which saw 3.7% growth in the business during the same period.

TCS is seeing revenue flow from the nearly $7 billion deals it signed over the last few months reflect in the quarter.

“In general, the BFSI segment is slowing down investments in traditional outsourcing work, but increasing aggressively in emerging areas such as automation and digital,” said Phil Fersht, CEO, HfS Research. “Hence this is more of an indication that TCS is currently winning the larger piece of the emerging tech areas and Infosys is playing catch-up”. The company which saw a management and board upheaval last year is now seeing stability return, but still needs to build back its expertise in winning large deals that are opening up in the market. “While both companies have the basic building blocks in place to win large deals, TCS is advantaged vs Infosys when it comes to platform and infrastructure services,” said Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO, Everest Group.

“Infosys is now having to rebuild the large deal team – back in the day they were one of the early pioneers of the large deal team construct. While this will take time, $1 billion in large deals is a good start for Salil (Parekh),” he said.

Parekh, who joined as Infosys CEO in January, has won deals of over $1.1 billion in the quarter to June, 40% of it from banking clients.

He says that the firm has stepped up its investments in sales to tap the business opportunities from clients in an improving environment.“We see good traction across geographies. We see opportunities in modernisation of our core business. The capabilities we have will have traction with our clients,” said Parekh in the post results news conference on Friday. In the same breath, he also saw that the firm will see growth acceleration in fiscal 2021 after stabilising the business.

His low-key comment, while still projecting a 6-8% below industry growth for the year, is in contrast with the positive commentary from his counterpart in TCS, who has indicated a double-digit growth at a higher revenue base.

“It is not as much challenges as something we need to execute. It is like a cricket match, every phase is different. We have done well on the consolidation phase, the opportunity now is to use the platform to accelerate. We have built up a good base,” he told ET in an interview last week. “We are now on good trajectory for fiscal 2019.”

Infosys has talked about growth revivals in the later part of this year on multiple fronts. Analysts, however, remain cautiously optimistic on the company. “As long as this quarter was a mere blip (and a minor one at that), I consider them to be on safe ground from an investor standpoint. However, a couple more disappointing quarters will raise eyebrows and turn off several investors who are sceptical of the market and its potential,” said Fersht.

Another analyst said that Infosys is on track with its commentary on execution.“Execution rigour is the mantra for the company going forward, having boiled down the strategic imperatives. Its inward focus thanks to the recent distractions mean that they will be left playing catch-up to the more focused players in the market over the next year or so,” said Ashish Chopra, IT analyst with Motilal Oswal in a note.