Julius Baer Group, DBS Group Holdings and LGT Bank are the likely bidders for ABN Amro's private banking business in Asia, Bloomberg reports. ABN Amro has put the business up for sale and hopes to announce a deal by the end of the year. The business is ranked as Asia's 18th largest private bank and is worth an estimated US$300 million. Other European banks, Barclays and Societe Generale, have recently sold Asian wealth management divisions. Bank of America has unveiled a "chatbot" named Erica to answer customer queries, Finextra reports. Erica will be available to the bank's 21 million mobile app users next year. In addition to answering queries about account balances and so on, Erica will include offer some basic financial coaching, using predictive analytics to offer guidance to smarter saving and sending. Chinese payments company Alipay is expanding into the United States market through partnerships with First Data and Verifone, the South China Morning Post reports. Alipay has 450 million active users of its mobile payment app in China and wants to capture the business of those customers when they are abroad. It has similar partnerships in Asia and Europe. In Britain, retailers Harrods, Selfridges and the Body Shop accept Alipay. Rather than compete head to head with established payments companies in these markets, Alipay's strategy is to service the millions of Chinese tourists. Italian lender Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena is to cut jobs, close branches and sell business units as part of a turnaround plan. The bank, which failed Europe's July stress tests, plans to cut 2600 full time employees to reduce personnel expenses by nine per cent and reduce branches from 2000 to 1500 over the next three years, according to the International Business Times. The world's oldest surviving bank is also seeking investor support for its plan to raise fresh capital of €5 billion and to sell bad loans to the tune of €28 billion.