A scheduled upgrade to its M-Pesa mobile finance service, announced last week by Kenyan operator Safaricom, was successfully completed today. It has been described as the most significant upgrade of the M-Pesa platform since 2015.
The upgrade, says Safaricom, introduces Fintech 2.0, a next-generation core platform designed to strengthen resilience, expand capacity, and unlock advanced, AI-driven innovation. This transformation, the company explains, positions M-Pesa to meet the growing demands of Africa’s digital economy while preparing for future opportunities.
The new M-Pesa core will expand capacity from 4,500 to 6,000 transactions per second, with the potential to scale up to 12,000 transactions as demand grows.
tIt will also introduce across multiple hosting sites an active-active architecture; this is a system setup where multiple, identical servers or nodes are online and processing requests simultaneously, sharing the workload through a load balancer. This will guarantee higher resilience and minimal service interruption.
The platform embeds advanced artificial intelligence to strengthen fraud detection, enable self-healing, and power real-time monitoring. Its cloud-native foundation ensures higher performance, instant scalability, and faster deployment of new products.
As the company, explains, over the years, M-Pesa has grown from a simple money transfer service into Africa’s largest fintech ecosystem and the launch of Fintech 2.0 is designed to sustain this growth and prepare the platform for the future.
Dr Peter Ndegwa, Group CEO, Safaricom, says: “This upgrade is a bold investment in the future of M-Pesa and reaffirmation of our commitment to innovation, resilience and customer trust. By moving to Fintech 2.0, we are unlocking a platform that not only scales to meet today’s demands but also anticipates tomorrow’s opportunities.”
