M. D. Ranganath
Analyst · Keith Bachman from Bank of Montreal. Please go ahead
So, I think in the financial services, we had a good quarter. If you strip out the results of Finacle, we grew at about 2.5%. And, you’re right, in the broker-dealer segment, we did see some headwinds. So, that was lower than we expected. But, I think it’s a -- I think it might -- we’re hopeful that it’ll comeback in the second half of the year. Overall, the story that we have, right, the software plus services story, I think that’s really resonating well with our clients. And the whole industry is in the middle of a transformation. So, there’s a huge amount of interest in technology, what it can do from the perspective of industrialization and reducing cost to income ratios and from the perspective of what digital transformation can do for the industry. We also see that the pressure on regulatory mandates and the compliance pressure still continues especially in Europe with PSD2 [ph] and MiFID II. So, we think that the spend in the industry should stay stable. And from our perspective, we see a strong pipeline for Q2. Even in Q1, if you read through our commentary, of the 10 large deal wins that we had that is deals over $50 million, three of these deals were in the financial services business, and this included consolidation deals but it also included deals where we led or where we are leading a payment transformation initiative for a bank in Australia. So, overall, I think we had a good quarter with stable to strong volume growth. On the Brexit question, I think this is something where like the rest of the industry and like actually the financial services business, we are in a wait and watch mode. There has been a lot of concern and there has been a lot of volatility. But, with the exception of one example, we have not really seen slowdowns or change in client behaviors. I think it could be a positive for us as clients look to restructure their businesses or as they look to move workforces to Continental Europe. They will also be -- spend on account of new regulatory and compliance mandates, which would mean system changes. But on the other hand, it would also mean a slowdown in decision making and a cut in spending. So, we are waiting to see the impact of that. Finally, just to echo what Manish said, more than Brexit, we are concerned about the interest rate scenarios, so the fact that interest rate hikes are unlikely or are going to be slower in the second half of the year. So, we are waiting to see what impact that has on spend.