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What to know about Safaricom
Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telco with over 35 million subscribers, has completed the most ambitious M-PESA core migration since localizing the platform a decade ago, restoring services early Monday morning after a three-hour cutover.
The upgrade, named Fintech 2.0, moves Africa’s second most widely used mobile money service to a cloud-native architecture capable of processing 6,000 transactions per second at launch, with headroom to double as demand grows “The scheduled M-PESA upgrade was successfully completed and all services fully restored. All M-PESA services are now available.
We look forward to serving you better and providing you with seamless experiences,” the telco said in a tweet on Monday morning.
The upgrade gives M-PESA more room to handle rising transaction volumes and simplifies how Safaricom adds new features.
It also makes it easier for banks and fintechs to connect to the system, a key step as digital payments become more competitive.
One person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity, told Techcabal that engineers are currently monitoring the system for irregularities, a process that could run for several days as live transaction data flows through the new core.
M-PESA processes more than 21 billion transactions a year, powering payments, credit, remittances, and e-commerce for over 50 million users across Africa.
The old system was running close to its 4,500-transactions-per-second limit, leaving little room for growth or flexibility.
The new setup, which uses microservices and is hosted locally in Huawei Cloud, allows Safaricom to update single components without taking the entire platform offline, a significant shift for reliability and speed.
Two other people close to the telco’s operations, who wished not to be named so they could speak freely, say the operator now wants to see how banks, fintechs, and developers integrate with the upgraded infrastructure.
More partnerships are expected, continuing a strategy first championed by the late ex-CEO Bob Collymore, who framed Safaricom’s future as a platform play rather than a closed service.
The new system should make it faster to roll out APIs, onboard partners, and experiment with products like merchant credit and cross-border payments.
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The successful migration buys Safaricom time as competitors push into mobile money. Airtel Money and new digital-first players have been growing steadily, challenging M-PESA’s lead.
