Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telecommunications provider, is preparing to carry out its most significant upgrade of the M-PESA platform since its local launch in 2015. Scheduled for September 22, the overhaul will migrate M-PESA to a powerful new core system dubbed Fintech 2.0.
This transition will impact more than 50 million M-PESA users across Africa and aims to boost transaction capacity, reduce service outages, and accelerate the rollout of new features.
To manage the upgrade, over 210 engineers based in Kenya, along with 100+ international experts, are working together to ensure a smooth migration. The company has allocated a three-hour window for the upgrade — during which all M-PESA services, including payments, transfers, and airtime purchases, will be temporarily offline.
Safaricom assures users that the upgrade window is enough to migrate customer data, conduct live system tests, and restore services before the morning peak. The migration is carefully timed to minimize disruption.
The existing M-PESA system has been running close to its maximum design capacity — processing around 4,500 transactions per second out of a 5,000 cap. This limitation has made scaling and feature expansion increasingly difficult.
Fintech 2.0 brings a cloud-native architecture built on microservices, enabling a significant performance boost. At launch, the upgraded system will handle 6,000 transactions per second, with scalability up to 12,000 transactions per second as user demand increases.
According to Felix Rop, Head of Financial Services Technology, this upgrade ensures M-PESA is future-ready, capable of supporting growing transaction volumes without service interruptions.
For users, this means faster, more reliable M-PESA services and quicker access to new features as Safaricom continues to evolve into a fully digital financial platform.
The upgrade marks a pivotal step in solidifying M-PESA’s role at the center of mobile financial services across Africa.
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