NAB spin-off Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank has been successful in getting Virgin Money to accept a £1.7 billion takeover deal. The deal with give Virgin's shareholders a 38 per cent stake in the combined group, the FT reports. CYBG will pay Richard Branson's Virgin Group an annual royalty fee of £12 million, rising to £15 million after five years. The two companies said the merger would create "a truly national competitor to the status quo", but unions raised the alarm over possible job cuts. The Bank of International Settlement has warned that the replacement of retail payments by cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin would break the internet and cause an environmental catastrophe, reports Finextra. In its annual economic report, the BIS said crypto was no replacement for fiat, and processing all the world's digital retail transactions would be beyond the capability of the world's servers. The electricity consumption used by bitcoin miners to generate new tokens would be an "environmental disaster", it says. Debit card payments have overtaken cash in the UK for the first time.  Thanks to online shopping and the popularity of contactless payments, there were 13.2 billion card payments at the end of 2017, overtaking cash payments at 13.1 billion payments. The report by UK Finance shows that, across both debit and credit cards, the number of contactless payments jumped by 97 per cent during 2017, while cash payments fell by 15 per cent over the same period.