LONDON – Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC is seeking bids for its international private bank within the next two weeks, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
Britain’s largest taxpayer-owned lender sent sale documents with details of Coutts International to potential buyers, said the person who asked not to be identified because the details are private. A spokesman at RBS declined to comment.
RBS CEO Ross McEwan, 57, is eliminating thousands of jobs, cutting about 1 billion pounds ($1.6 billion) in costs and focusing on wealthy clients in the United Kingdom as he seeks to reverse six consecutive annual losses. The Edinburgh, Scotland-based lender earlier this year raised $3 billion by selling shares in its Citizens Financial Group Inc.
Shares in RBS fell 0.7 percent to 400.6 pence at 1:54 p.m. in London. They have gained 18 percent this year, making them the best performers among Britain’s largest five lenders.
RBS was examining options including a sale, joint ventures or merging Coutts International, according to a memo to employees in August. The business, which counts Queen Elizabeth II among its customers, had 32.6 billion Swiss francs ($33 billion) of assets under management at the end of 2013.
A sale of the international unit could raise at least 500 million pounds, the Financial Times reported without saying where it obtained the information.
HSBC, DBS
Potential bidders for the non-U.K. parts of Coutts include DBS Group Holdings Ltd., Southeast Asia’s largest lender, people familiar with the talks said earlier this month. The Singapore bank is working with Citigroup Inc. as it studies a potential bid.
Credit Suisse Group AG, HSBC Holdings PLC, J. Safra Sarasin Holding AG, Bank of Montreal, BNP Paribas SA, Julius Baer Group Ltd. and Malayan Banking Bhd. are also among 10 potential bidders for the division in a sale that could raise about $1 billion, Reuters reported earlier Monday, citing people familiar with the matter it didn’t identify.
Banque Syz & Co. SA, the Geneva private bank and asset manager, may add assets of Coutts to a list of acquisition targets in Europe, co-founder Eric Syz said in August. Officials at the bank declined to comment Monday.
Other Swiss banks also have signaled interest. Zeno Staub, CEO of Vontobel Holding AG, told reporters on Sept. 11 that Coutts would be among assets that the lender would be most interested in. Boris Collardi, CEO of Julius Baer, told Gulf Business in an interview published last week that the bank may not participate in an auction for the Coutts unit, adding that “if the price is right you always have to look at it.”
A price of at least 500 million pounds is “more likely to appeal to other more aggressive players,” analysts including Jonas Floriani and Mark Phin at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods wrote in a note dated Nov. 24. “Although we believe that both Vontobel and Julius Baer are well positioned and capitalized to absorb Coutts International assets, we think it is unlikely that they will enter a pricing war for the business.”
Spokesmen for J. Safra Sarasin, Credit Suisse, BNP Paribas’s wealth-management unit, HSBC’s private bank and Julius Baer declined to comment.
