SCOTLAND'S financial community is braced for a challenging year ahead, with confidence having taken a knock since the autumn, writes Jane Bradley.
Scottish Financial Enterprise's quarterly industry snapshot, prepared by SFE and consultants Capgemini, revealed that about a third of respondents expect to report decreased business in the first quarter of this year.
A similar number were pes
simistic about the full year to December.
The report comes a day after a downbeat survey of the sector by the CBI and accountant PricewaterhouseCoopers showed that the number of people employed by financial services firms had fallen at the fastest rate in five years.
Owen Kelly, chief executive of SFE, said: "These quarterly results very much reflect the environment in which we are operating.
"It is quite volatile and some decline in confidence is unsurprising.
"However, the diversity of our industry in Scotland and the continuing focus on the long term, for many of our member companies, offer some resilience."
Looking back at the final quarter of 2007, 38 per cent of firms reported that business volumes had improved, while 27 per cent said business volumes were down compared to the previous quarter.
Around a third believed that business volumes would fall in the first quarter of 2008.
The figures were collated between December 2007 and February 2008.
