Julius Baer taking look at Barclays Asia wealth arm - CEO

ZURICH (Reuters) - Private bank Julius Baer (BAER.VX) is considering whether to bid for Barclays' (BARC.L) Asian private wealth business as part of the Swiss group's acquisition campaign, Chief Executive Boris Collardi told Reuters on Monday.

Barclays has picked Lazard (LAZ.N) to help advise on the deal amid efforts to scale back in Asia, three sources with knowledge of the matter said last month.

"We haven't decided yet whether this (business) is something interesting for us or not, but I think we're going to see more of that happening," Collardi said in a telephone interview, elaborating on earlier comments about potential takeovers.

"We normally look at everything in order for us to come to a conclusion whether it is interesting or not. That's how we can be expressing ourselves so clearly about a number of other targets," he added.

Baer, with 300 billion Swiss francs ($295 billion) of assets under management, is looking for private banking assets that either stand alone or are part of a larger bank.

"It needs a certain size, so anything I would say up from 30 billion onwards, 50 billion, 70 billion," he said, adding potential targets had to have shed undeclared wealth and offer synergies once put on Baer's platform.

Barclays managed $36 billion in private banking assets in Asia as of 2014, according to a survey by industry publication Private Banker International, ranking it 14th in Asia.

($1 = 1.0163 Swiss francs)

(Reporting by Michael Shields and Angelika Gruber; editing by Adrian Croft)