Royal Bank of Canada, which is reportedly among the suitors for the non-US wealth management arm of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, is keen to add asset management capacity in emerging markets and would consider making acquisitions worth more than $1 billion, a senior executive says.

"We're looking at adding capacity to some degree in emerging markets," RBC’s chief financial officer, Janice Fukakusa, told a financial conference in New York, Reuters reported.

"To add any more capability in Canada would be nice, but the opportunities are more in emerging markets or outside of Canada,” Fukakusa said.

BoA Merrill’s non-US business, located in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, is expected to cost between $1.5 billion and $2 billon, the report said. Besides RBC, Credit Suisse is reportedly among potential buyers of the unit.

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.

BoA has reportedly put its non-US wealth business up for sale, a unit that includes units in Asia excluding Japan, Europe and the Middle East and Latin America. The bank has so far declined to comment about the matter. 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.

Bank of America’s non-US business manages about $90 billion of an estimated $2 trillion that the BoA wealth division oversees globally.