Zedcrest Group has completed its acquisition of Leatherback, folding the UK-founded cross-border payments startup into Nigeria’s financial services conglomerate for an undisclosed sum. The deal turns a five-year investor relationship into full ownership, and it gives Zedcrest a fintech arm it can plug directly into its investment banking, asset management and securities businesses.
Leatherback will keep operating as an independent subsidiary, retaining its brand and its management team under chief executive Ochebhoya Ekpete. That structure matters. Rather than absorbing Leatherback’s technology and discarding the shell, Zedcrest is betting the startup’s product and customer relationships are worth preserving intact, with its own balance sheet doing the heavy lifting on regulatory licensing, banking partnerships and enterprise expansion that Leatherback struggled to fund alone.
The acquisition is not a cold start. Zedcrest Capital led Leatherback’s $10 million pre-seed round back in 2021, the same year the startup launched its multi-currency payment infrastructure for businesses and individuals moving money across borders. TechMoonshot profiled Leatherback in its roundup of African startups to watch, where the company’s March 2024 partnership with India’s YES Bank stood out as a signal of ambition beyond its core Nigeria-UK-Canada corridor. That expansion push continues under the new ownership: Leatherback plans to open hubs in Canada and Kenya to run its North American and East African operations.
Zedcrest Group Managing Director Adedayo Amzat framed the deal as more than a portfolio addition. “This acquisition represents far more than an expansion of our portfolio,” Amzat said in a statement announcing the deal. “It reflects our conviction that the future of financial services will be shaped by technology, global connectivity, and institutional trust.” The framing lines up with Zedcrest’s broader strategy since 2024, when it acquired RMB Nigeria Stockbrokers and rebranded it as Zedcrest Securities, extending the group’s footprint from traditional capital markets into digital payments infrastructure.
The commercial logic is straightforward. Africa’s cross-border payments market is projected to reach $1 trillion by 2035, and Leatherback has already built proprietary core banking and ledger technology that gives it more control over transaction costs than fintechs reliant on third-party rails. For Zedcrest, buying that infrastructure outright is faster than building it, and it slots neatly beside the group’s existing treasury and enterprise client relationships.
It is also worth being direct about what Leatherback brings to this deal beyond technology. In 2023, Nigerian authorities investigated transactions linked to an external entity that had passed through a Leatherback account, a case that ended in forfeited funds even though co-founder and then-CEO Ibrahim Toyeeb Ibitade was cleared of wrongdoing before stepping down in October 2024. Interim leadership followed before Ekpete took over. A full acquisition by a well-capitalised, institutionally governed parent gives Leatherback exactly what a fintech recovering from a compliance scare needs most: stronger oversight and a backer with enough balance sheet to absorb regulatory friction the startup could not weather alone.
That pattern is becoming familiar in Nigerian fintech. TechMoonshot has tracked how Africa’s tech ecosystem is consolidating around a handful of dominant platforms that would rather buy a struggling but technically capable startup than watch it collapse or lose ground to competitors like Kredete, which has built its own diaspora-focused cross-border remittance business, or newer entrants such as Kulipa, which is chasing the same stablecoin-powered payments opportunity from a different angle. Whether Zedcrest can integrate Leatherback without diluting the product speed that made it attractive in the first place is the open question. Financial conglomerates have a mixed record of letting acquired fintechs move at startup pace once institutional governance and compliance layers get bolted on.
What happens next will say more about Zedcrest’s execution than about Leatherback’s technology. The startup now has the balance sheet to chase regulatory licences and banking partnerships across new markets that were previously out of reach. It also now answers to a parent whose core business is measured in capital adequacy ratios and audit cycles, not sprint velocity. Cross-border payments founders elsewhere on the continent will be watching to see which instinct wins.
