Exciplex-thermally activated delayed fluorescence (exciplex-TADF) devices have displayed great application potential in developing organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) with simple-process and high-performance, because the doped ratio of electron donor and acceptor in exciplex device is easily controlled as well as repeated, and small singlet-triplet energy splitting (ΔE_ST) can be easily achieved for harvesting TADF. However, the current reported electron acceptors are still rare, which mainly focus on traditional electron-attracting structures, such as nitrogen-heterocycles, triarylboron, triazine- arenes and diphenylphosphine oxides, etc. Therefore, it is highly desirable to construct new acceptor structures for improving exciplex device performance. In this work, we design and synthesize a novel cyano-substituted 9-phenylfluorene derivative (TCNDPFCz) as an electron acceptor to form exciplex emission through adopting 1,1-bis[(di-4-tolylamino)phenyl]-cyclohexane (TAPC) as an electron donor. Our experimental results show that the mixed system (TAPC:TCNDPFCz) exhibits bright exciplex emission at 535 nm and a favourable photoluminescence quantum yield (PLQY) of 54%. Subsequently, temperature-dependent transient fluorescence decay experiment is carried out, which indicates that the TAPC:TCNDPFCz film possesses TADF feature. It is suggested that the satisfactory PLQY value benefits from the exciplex-TADF of TAPC:TCNDPFCz. The low-temperature fluorescence and phosphorescence measurements are also performed and show that the TAPC:TCNDPFCz film displays smaller ΔE_ST value of 0.05 eV. It is obvious that such small ΔE_ST value promotes the reverse intersystem crossing from non-radiative triplet state to radiative singlet state of TAPC:TCNDPFCz, thus achieving TADF process. Additionally, electrochemical measurement shows that the TAPC:TCNDPFCz system displays large driving force of 0.41 eV in its exciplex-formation processes, which implies that the exciplex-emission (TAPC:TCNDPFCz) can be realized easily. More than that, it indicates that the acceptor TCNDPFCz possesses strong electron-accepting ability through tetracyano-substitution. An exciplex-OLED using TAPC:TCNDPFCz as the emitting layer is then fabricated, which exhibits a low turn-on voltage of 2.6 V with a maximum current efficiency of 27.2 cd•A^‒1, power efficiency of 32.9 lm•W^‒1 and external quantum efficiency of 12.5%. Therefore, the favourable photoluminescence and electroluminescence efficiencies of TAPC:TCNDPFCz are related to the strong electron-acceptability of TCNDPFCz and large driving force in the exciplex emission process. Our work suggests the 9-phenylfluorene can be used as a molecular skeleton to design new electron acceptors for exciplex-TADF.