Bank J Safra Sarasin has agreed to acquire the Swiss private banking business of Morgan Stanley, the firm said as the US firm continues to shed some of its non-US wealth management business.

Bank J Safra Sarasin has agreed to acquire the Swiss private banking business of Morgan Stanley, the firm said as the US firm continues to shed some of its non-US wealth management business.

Morgan Stanley has already agreed to sell part of its international, non-US private banking arm to Credit Suisse.

The business sold to Bank J Safra Sarasin operated as Bank Morgan Stanley, with offices in Zurich and Geneva. The agreement covers qualifying clients and their relationship management teams focused on ultra-high net worth clients across Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Latin America.

The acquisition is expected to be completed in early 2015, subject to regulatory approval. Terms of the transaction have not been disclosed.

Such a deal adds to a run of mergers, acquisitions and restructurings affecting the Swiss banking industry in recent years, as the country adapts to pressures on its decades-old bank secrecy laws, as well as due to the need for economies of scale in a higher-cost environment. Morgan Stanley, like its peer, Bank of America, has spun off non-US wealth management due to having not succeeded in achieving the critical mass of business it wanted in such markets to make them financially worthwhile.

Analysts told this publication that as Swiss banks seek to adjust business models to cope with changes to bank secrecy laws, and as US firms focus less on markets where they lack a big footprint, more of such M&A activity is likely.