“Only the paranoid survive.” – Andrew S. Grove, former Intel CEO.
That’s the way Silicon Valley operates. If you doubt us, sit down and investigate why Silicon Valley CEOs stalk each other’s moves like chess grandmasters. Think Elon Musk vs. Sam Altman and their OpenAI bicker. It’s not personal—it’s survival. That same paranoia is seeping into the way some African companies operate.Â
Safaricom is one of them. After nearly two decades, how has M-Pesa, its mobile money heavy-weight, stayed relevant in mobile payments?
The answer is paranoia, which births innovation. Safaricom is pumping $309 million annually into M-Pesa, its largest revenue-maker, to open up its super tech infrastructure to Kenyan builders.
It has had to review its principles on how it builds its technology, essentially cannibalising itself. In 2017, for example, Safaricom’s chairman, Nicholas Ng’ang’a, told regulators they should not punish the company for “its success” after being encouraged to share its infrastructure with rivals.
Today, however, Safaricom has walked back on that ideology. Fintechs, conceding that mobile money payments are still second nature to most Kenyans, have mostly tried to build around M-Pesa’s tech—like PrivPay, which shut down in 2024.
Cloud-native. API-first. Plug-and-play. Not because it wants to give up ground, but because the more connected M-Pesa becomes, the harder it is to replace. This new infrastructure is designed to be the pipes behind Kenya’s entire payments system—connecting banks, fintechs, SACCOs, card payments, and rival wallets into one interoperable network.Â
If a taxi driver gets paid from a bank app, or a vendor uses a SACCO wallet to buy inventory, M-Pesa can still be in the loop—quietly handling the rails, silently earning. Rivals may grow, but only inside a system Safaricom now quietly owns.
It’s anybody’s guess whether in ten years, mobile money payments will become less popular than they are now in Kenya. But Safaricom and M-Pesa aren’t sticking around to find out. With M-Pesa 2.0, they’re building the rails to future-proof their payments play.
