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Swiss bank Notenstein plans to buy clients of wealth manager LBBW

[August 29, 2014]  ZURICH (Reuters) - Swiss private bank Notenstein is to buy the client assets of Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg's (LLBW) Swiss wealth management arm, it said on Friday, in the continuing gradual consolidation of the Swiss banking sector.

Swiss wealth manager LBBW has about 1 billion Swiss francs ($1.09 billion) in assets under management and Notenstein, which is owned by Swiss lender Raiffeisen, said it expected to take on most of these assets.

A spokeswoman for Notenstein declined to disclose the price of the deal and said that the bank planned to take on a handful of LBBW's client advisory staff as part of the transaction, without elaborating further.

A Notenstein statement said that it expects to conclude the deal in the fourth quarter of this year.

Some experts expect the Swiss banking sector to shrink by around a third in the coming years as higher regulatory costs push smaller players to sell up or close down.

Julius Baer, which has been an active acquirer, said last month that it would buy the private banking activities of Israel's Bank Leumi in Luxembourg and Switzerland for up to 70 million francs.

An expected resolution to the U.S. tax evasion investigation into Swiss banks is expected to be a catalyst for consolidation in the country's private banking industry, senior bank executives told the Reuters Wealth Management Summit in June.

(1 US dollar = 0.9158 Swiss franc)

(Reporting by Joshua Franklin and Oliver Hirt; Editing by David Goodman)

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