Banks and insurers across Europe announced profit warnings, writedowns and trading losses on Wednesday amid further evidence that the financial turmoil will continue to eat into balance sheets for months and even years.

As gloom mounted across the Continent, ING, the Dutch financial services group, posted its first quarterly loss and Swiss Life, Switzerland's third-biggest insurer, conceded that it would fail to meet its targets this year.

The turbulence also cut into profits at Unicredit, Italy's second-biggest bank; Hypo Real Estate, the German lender saved by a government-backed deal last month; and Natixis, a French investment bank, which revealed a €250 million (£209 million) trading loss.

Swiss Life said that it expected to end the year with an operating loss, offset only by extraordinary gains of SwFr1.5 billion (£844 million) from disposals. Bruno Pfister, its chief executive, said: “We cannot confirm our earnings guidance for 2008.” He added that investors could no longer count on the SwFr600 million dividend that they had been promised.

Fabrizio Croce, an analyst for Kepler Capital Markets, described as “catastrophic” the group's third-quarter revenue from premiums, which fell 11 per cent to SwFr3.08 billion.

In an indication of the deepening crisis in the insurance industry, ING reported a quarterly loss of €478 million after property writedowns, counterparty losses and impairments on stocks and bonds totalling €1.5 billion. The group claims to be one of the Continent's healthiest financial institutions, but nevertheless it took a €10 billion capital injection from the Dutch Government last month after its shares fell to a 15-year low.

Hypo Real Estate fuelled concern over its strength with a €3.1 billion third-quarter pre-tax loss, worse than expected, after writedowns of €3.1 billion linked to Depfa, its infrastructure finance unit, and to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The lender gave warning that its results were likely to get worse as it repays the €50 billion bailout approved by Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor.

Konrad Becker, an analyst for Merck Finck, said that the lender could be forced to announce annual losses over the next two years because of the cost of the rescue package.

In Italy, Unicredit announced a 54 per cent drop in third-quarter net profit to €551 million, to the relief of investors who had been fearing an even worse set of figures. The bank has scrapped dividends and launched a plan to raise €6.6 billion in a bid to boost its Core Tier 1 ratio — a measure of a bank's solidity — from 5.7 per cent to 6.7 per cent.

HVB, Unicredit's German unit, said that it would cut up to 2,500 jobs by 2010 as part of the cost-reduction programme.

In France, Natixis became the latest bank to reveal a significant trading loss when it admitted that last month's market turbulence had cost it €250 million.

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