CYBG's big bid for Virgin Money

Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank is aiming to snap up Virgin Money. Will the merged firm be more of a threat to the big banks? Alice Gråhns reports.

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"Being a UK challenger bank, it seems, is just a little bit too challenging," says Matthew Vincent in the Financial Times. TSB has spent two weeks struggling to make its IT systems work, while some shareholders are griping that Metro Bank "has spent too much on its chairman's travel and his wife's design business". Now Virgin Money, the bank in which Richard Branson's Virgin Group is still the biggest shareholder, is "looking for an exit". This week, the firm confirmed that it had "received a preliminary and conditional proposal" from CYBG, the owner of Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank, to acquire its entire business in a £1.6bn all-share deal. If it goes through, it would mean Virgin Money's challenge to the UK high-street banks comes to an end just six years after the firm bought the remains of Northern Rock, which had been nationalised during the financial crisis.

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Alice grew up in Stockholm and studied at the University of the Arts London, where she gained a first-class BA in Journalism. She has written for several publications in Stockholm and London, and joined MoneyWeek in 2017.