Safaricom, Kenya’s biggest public company by market capitalisation, plans to double the capacity of its M-PESA mobile money platform by the end of 2026, a move that could fortify the service as the backbone of Kenya’s financial system.
Safaricom’s head of IT, Felix Rop, said in an interview on August 8 that the company will expand M-PESA’s capacity to handle up to 8,000 transactions per second — equivalent to 252 billion in a year — from its current 4,000 per second. The upgrade comes amid growing demand for digital payments and increasing scrutiny over the resilience of financial infrastructure in East Africa’s biggest economy.
“By next year [2026], around April, we should be having a capacity of 6,000 transactions per second on the system. Of course, it’s a progressive delivery,” said Rop. “And we should have almost 8,000 per second as capacity irrespective of whether customers come to use or not by the end of next year.”
Safaricom has committed more than KES40 billion ($309.6 million) to M-PESA upgrades, signalling a shift from product development to building payments infrastructure at par with global financial networks.
“M-Pesa 2.0 is the next phase of the M-Pesa platform,” said chief executive Peter Ndegwa in May. “It’s about investing for capacity, for functionality, for stability, and also for resilience, which is about ensuring that customers can always rely on our ecosystem.”
Launched in 2007, M-Pesa has grown into Kenya’s dominant payments system, processing more than 21 million daily transactions and embedding itself in everyday life, from utility bills to school fees and business payrolls. Its last major upgrade was in 2021, when Safaricom moved from Release 4 to Release 6 to improve performance.
M-PESA is one of the safest mobile money platforms. Still, its executives say the demands of today’s digital economy—where outages trigger instant public backlash and cyber risks are intensifying—require further fortification.
“We are going into a new modern M-PESA coming soon, where we’ll now change it to 100 per cent cloud native,” Rop said. “We are setting up a private cloud within the same architecture, fully resilient.”
M-PESA has evolved from a consumer product to a national payments utility, an infrastructure that must always be available. In 2024, the platform processed an estimated KES 40 trillion ($309.4 billion) in transactions, highlighting its role as a key part of Kenya’s financial system and one of the largest mobile money platforms globally.
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