The London market fell as it was weighed down by disappointing results from Barclays and Royal Dutch Shell.
The lender booked a £290 million foreign exchange charge and outlined around £1 billion of costs to separate its retail banking arm from the investment banking division.
The FTSE 100 Index fell 42 points to 6395.8, giving back most of the gains the market made in the previous session.
France's Cac 40 and Germany's DAX were both down around 0.5 per cent. In New York the Dow Jones Industrial Index was lower by around 50 points in early trading.
The pound was up against the US dollar at 1.53, after official data showed that US gross domestic product slowed sharply to 1.5 per cent in the third quarter from 3.9 per cent in the previous three months. Sterling was lower against the euro at just over 1.39.
Barclays, which on Wednesday confirmed the appointment of Jes Staley as its new group chief executive officer, was down six per cent, or 15.9p, to 237.3p. The stock was the biggest faller in the top flight.
Investor concerns over bank profitability weighed on other stocks, with Lloyds Banking Group down 0.2p to 74.2p and Royal Bank of Scotland 5.7p lower at 320.7p.
Shell was down 25.5p to 1717p after it revealed it had taken an $8.6bn (£5.65bn) hit to cover the cost of halting projects such as Alaskan drilling and the Carmon Creek oil sands project in Canada.
It added that its third-quarter current cost of supplies earnings, the company's definition of net income, came in at $1.8bn (£1.2bn), below analysts' expectations of $2.7bn (£1.8bn) and 70 per cent lower than a year ago.
Telecoms operator BT was up 1p to 469.6p, after it signed up a record 106,000 TV customers in its second quarter of the year, boosted by the start of the telecoms operator's Champions League football coverage.
It said the extra viewers helped lift the telecoms giant's adjusted pre-tax profits in the six months to the end of September by five per cent to £1.4 billion compared to a year ago.
Insurer Aviva lifted 4.7p to 484.1p, after it said the value of its new business jumped by a quarter in the first nine months of the year following its acquisition of rival Friends Life.
The insurance giant revealed new business had lifted by 25 per cent to £823 million over the period compared to a year ago, notching up its 11th straight quarter of growth.
Aviva snapped up Friends Life for £5.6b in April, sealing the industry's biggest merger since 2000 and creating a group comprising 31,500 employees.
The biggest risers in the FTSE 100 Index were Merlin Entertainments up 8.9p at 409.3p, Hikma Pharmaceuticals up 39p at 2146p, Mondi up 23p to 1513p and Next up 100p at 8000p.
The biggest fallers in the FTSE 100 Index were Barclays down 15.9p at 237.3p, Meggitt down 19.7p at 347.3p, Randgold Resources down 237p at 4449p and Smith and Nephew down 54p at 1096p.
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