SWISS private bank Julius Baer is interested in acquiring Coutts International, a unit of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), but will not get into a bidding war for the venerable British bank's overseas arm, a Swiss paper reported on Sunday.

"Coutts has to be an issue for us, if only because of the name and the brand," Julius Baer chief executive Boris Collardi told mass-market newspaper Sonntagsblick in an interview.

RBS said in August it was considering selling the international arm of Coutts in a deal industry sources said could net it as much as US$1 billion.