Access Holdings Plc’s UK unit paid £36.75 million (N67.695 billion) in cash for Zempler Bank Ltd., a London-based digital lender to microbusinesses, and turned the deal into an immediate N27.28 billion accounting gain that lifted the Nigerian group’s nine-month profit.
The Access Bank UK Ltd. bought 100% of Zempler on February 27, with no deferred or contingent payment, and the consideration converted to N67.70 billion ($49.61 million), the filing shows.
That implies about N1,842 per pound and N1,365 per dollar, on MoneyCentral calculations. Zempler, formerly Cashplus Bank, was sold for roughly £3.45 a share, less than half the £80 million valuation of its 2020 funding round, City AM reported in February.
What Access Bought
Zempler’s own annual report for the year to March 2026 shows a small, liquid and thinly profitable bank.
Pretax profit fell 19% to £4.23 million and profit after tax fell 19% to £2.78 million, while gross revenue was flat at £67.97 million.
Customer deposits rose 14% to £713.3 million and net loans climbed 38% to £35.1 million on card lending, while open accounts increased 9.4% to 186,364, the report shows.
The cost-to-income ratio worsened to 91.9% from 90.7%, impairment charges rose 73% to £6.53 million, and the CET1 ratio improved to 21.7%.
Zempler has opened more than 2.2 million accounts since launch, the bank said in its 2024 results.
At £36.75 million, Access paid about 13.2 times Zempler’s latest annual profit, 1.0 times its £36.79 million book equity, and about 5.2% of its deposit base, on MoneyCentral calculations.
Zempler’s return on equity was about 8%. Its annual profit of roughly N5.12 billion at the deal exchange rate is small next to Access’s nine-month profit after tax of N474.17 billion.
Zempler lends only about 5% of its deposits and keeps 92% of its acquired assets in cash and securities, so its returns depend on UK interest rates, which are falling.
N27bn Accounting Gain Built on Intangibles
Access booked net assets of N94.97 billion against the N67.70 billion in cash it paid, producing a “bargain purchase” accounting gain of N27.28 billion that went straight through the income statement.
The accounting is still provisional, and customer deposits, receivables, other intangibles and deferred tax are yet to be finalised.
The gain rests almost entirely on intangible assets that Access valued itself, including a N15.16 billion core deposit intangible, N16.16 billion of software and technology, and a N0.73 billion brand value.
Strip out those N32.04 billion of intangibles and tangible net assets were N62.93 billion, leaving no paper gains to book on the transaction.
Without the gain, Access’s nine-month pretax profit of N667.36 billion would have risen 3.9% from a year earlier instead of the reported 8.3%.
The N27.28 billion gain is an accounting gain resulting from Access’s own valuation of intangibles, not cash, and could be revised before the valuation is final.
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