The three largest Swiss banks – UBS, Credit Suisse and Julius Baer – have been named in a report as being among those firms bidding for the non-US parts of the Bank of America Merrill Lynch wealth management business.

The three largest Swiss banks – UBS, Credit Suisse and Julius Baer – have been named by the Financial Times as three firms bidding for the non-US parts of the Bank of America Merrill Lynch wealth management business.

Wells Fargo, the US bank is also mentioned, although the FT report did not refer to Royal Bank of Canada, which has been rumoured to have been a potential suitor in past media reports. (RBC declined to comment when this publication approached it about the matter previously).

The newspaper said the auction for BoA Merrill Lynch’s business has begun; the unit has around $90 billion of assets around the world and could fetch a purchase of price of more than $3 billion, according to unnamed sources cited by the paper.

One European bank has told this publication that a purchase price in the region of $2 billion or above is far too high for the size of assets in question, and that it might be likely that banks will want to acquire teams of managers from BoA Merrill Lynch instead.

Banks have declined to comment on any bids when questioned by this publication in the recent past about such a deal.

Analysts have told WealthBriefing that such a transaction would make sense as BoA, which acquired Merrill Lynch in 2009, has failed to achieve critical mass in its non-US wealth business in recent years.

If a deal does take place, it will represent one of the bigger merger and acquisition deals in wealth management during recent years. Despite talk of how the sector, faced with tighter margins, is ripe for a wave of consolidation, actual deals have tended to lag behind the talk. There have been some piecemeal changes, such as the move by Brazil’s Safra Group to buy the controlling stake in Switzerland’s Sarasin, the private bank, from its previous owner, Netherlands-based Rabobank.