Unpacking Safaricom’s Upgraded M-PESA System and What It Means to Users

Safaricom, Kenya’s leading telecommunications company, has announced the upgrade of its M-PESA system to a new technology as it celebrates 18 years of M-PESA since its launch in 2007.

The upgrade involves transitioning Safaricom’s M-PESA system to Fintech 2.0, a next-generation core platform designed to strengthen resilience, expand capacity, and unlock advanced AI-driven innovations. This positions M-PESA to meet the growing demands of Africa’s digital economy while preparing for future opportunities.

Speaking during the launch on Friday, September 19, 2025, at the Michael Joseph Centre at Safaricom’s headquarters in Westlands, Safaricom’s Chief of Financial Services, Esther Waititu, said the upgrade was necessary due to rising transaction volumes and changing customer behavior.

“As we see transaction volumes increasing rapidly and customer behavior evolving, it has become important for us to think about how we can keep up with these changing trends in society and technology. To ensure we continue to solve daily challenges, we must define and leverage new technologies. That is why we are upgrading M-PESA’s core system—the platform that processes all our transactions today,” said Waititu.

Safaricom Upgrades Its M-PESA System to Fintech 2.0

The new technology to be adopted by M-PESA, known as Fintech 2.0, will cover three key areas: microservices, cloud enablement, and an AI-driven platform.

Safaricom’s Chief of Financial Services, Esther Waititu, explained that focusing on these areas will make the company future-ready, as they align with current global trends.

Also Read: Safaricom Announces System Disruption Affecting M-Pesa and Airtime Purchases

She noted that Safaricom settled on microservices because they provide flexibility to innovate, deliver new solutions, and update individual components without disrupting the entire ecosystem.

On cloud infrastructure, Waititu said the company chose this approach to increase transaction speed.

“We process a lot of transactions daily. To give your perspective, when we started 18 years ago, we processed fewer than 100 transactions per second. Today, we average 100 million transactions daily—and the number keeps growing. As we introduce more use cases and continue to innovate, transaction speed and system design must improve. Cloud infrastructure is critical to achieving that,” said Waititu.

Benefits of the New System

Regarding AI integration, she stated that Safaricom aims to leverage artificial intelligence to deliver personalized customer solutions and enhance fraud detection within the M-PESA core system.

Safaricom’s Head of Financial Services IT, Felix Rop, added that the new M-PESA upgrade will also reduce downtime, which sometimes disrupts transactions.

“This upgrade is more complex than the one in 2015 because traffic has grown significantly. Back then, we had about 200 transactions per second. Today, peaks reach almost 4,400,” said Rop.

Also Read: How to Reverse an M-PESA Transaction Error

He further explained that at peak hours, such as 7 p.m., nearly 4,200 customers transact per second on the platform.

“Any downtime, even for just a second, impacts thousands of customers,” he added.

According to Rop, the benefits of Fintech 2.0 compared to the previous G3 technology will include:

• 99% service availability, compared to the previous four minutes of downtime during service BCP.
• Seamless online upgrades through gray release, unlike before when upgrades risked impacting all customers.
• Cloud-based architecture with higher performance and auto-scalable resources.
• Full cloud-native design supporting more than 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) and unlimited software capacity, compared to the previous 5,000 TPS limit.

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