Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telco, has completed the biggest M-PESA upgrade since launching the mobile money platform over a decade ago.
In the early hours of Monday, the telco restored services after a three-hour cutover that shifted its mobile money service to a new cloud-native system named Fintech 2.0
Out with the old. Fintech 2.0 was built to handle Africa’s busiest payments rail. The old setup was built to process a maximum of 5,000 transactions per second, and was already near its ceiling at 4,500. It was running out of room to grow. This new architecture starts at 6,000 transactions per second, with room to double as demand rises.
More importantly, it allows Safaricom engineers to upgrade or fix components of the platform without shutting the whole thing down. Safaricom is betting that the new system might bring more partnerships and plugins. Whether that gamble pays is left for us to find out, but Fintech 2.0 gives it a good shot.
Why should M-PESA users care? For a platform that processes more than 21 billion transactions a year, a sturdier and more flexible core means faster transactions, fewer outages, faster rollouts of new features, and smoother connections for banks, fintechs, and developers.
For competitors already eating into M-PESA’s market share, Fintech 2.0 is a reset button that could reassert its dominance in Africa’s digital payments race.
