Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS), which has been majority owned by the British government since the global financial crisis, is in the final stage of talks to sell some of its Asian assets to regional institutions, including China International Capital (CICC), the country's No 1 investment bank.
CICC - led by Levin Zhu, the son of former Chinese premier Zhu Rongji - plans to take RBS' Southeast Asia equities-research team, with most staff based in Singapore, and Malaysia's CIMB Group is set to take RBS' research team for the rest of Asia and Australia, according to people briefed on the matter.
Besides the planned takeover of the RBS research team in Asia, CICC and CIMB also plan to acquire some other investment-banking businesses from RBS. But it was unclear which other assets were up for sale, said the sources, who declined to be identified as they were not authorised to speak to the media.
RBS has around 100 employees on its research team in Asia, mostly in Hong Kong, which is considered part of North Asia, so industry analysts currently working for RBS in Hong Kong are likely to become CIMB's new employees.
The final-round talks on RBS' Asian assets followed discussions with other potential buyers in the past month, including BOC International (BOCI) and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ).
Both BOCI, the investment banking arm of the Bank of China, and ANZ, which is expanding aggressively outside Australia, recently abandoned the talks because of concerns over price, said the sources.