dLocal Buys AZA Finance Assets in $23.7M Deal

In Short

• dLocal turned a planned full acquisition of AZA Finance into a smaller asset purchase worth $23.7 million.
• The deal includes a Cameroon payments entity and licence, brand-related intellectual property, and customer relationships.
• It was completed on February 27, 2026, after talks that started publicly in June 2025.

What Happened

dLocal first announced in June 2025 that it intended to acquire AZA Finance, a Kenya-based cross-border payments company.

Cross-border payments means moving money between countries, usually by connecting banks, mobile money providers, and local payout partners. Bloomberg reported at the time that AZA Finance was valued at around $150 million in a 2024 funding round, although neither company published deal terms.

Eight months later, the transaction landed in a different shape. On February 27, 2026, dLocal acquired three key assets instead of buying the whole company.

Those assets were Mint Code Solutions S.A., a Cameroonian payments entity and its payment licence, intellectual property linked to NeWurth S.A. in Luxembourg, which holds the company behind the AZA Finance brand, and customer relationships across AZA Finance’s African payments business.

dLocal acquired the assets by cancelling debt it had previously extended to AZA Finance. In simple terms, it used a debt write-off as payment, rather than paying cash.

Why It Matters

This outcome is a reminder that buying into African payments infrastructure is rarely straightforward. A payments licence is a regulator-issued approval to move money, similar to a permit that lets a company legally operate payment services in a market.

In many African markets, licences, local relationships, and regulatory approvals take years to build. They are also hard to transfer cleanly, which can push companies toward asset deals instead of full acquisitions.

For dLocal, the asset purchase still provides a route to expand its local rails and enterprise merchant reach across Africa, while limiting exposure to parts of the business it did not want. For founders and investors, it underlines a key point in fintech M&A, what gets announced is not always what gets completed.