Over the last few weeks, a team of 210 people in Kenya and another 100 based outside Kenya, has been working on the latest upgrade of the system that runs M-PESA.
They have been testing, running dry runs and conducting dress rehearsals of how one of Kenya’s most important mobile money platform prepares for an upgrade
The upgraded platform is dubbed Fintech 2.0 and is guaranteed to be available 99.999 per cent of the time, with Felix Rop, Safaricom’s Head of Financial Services IT, confident that any failures would be felt by a very small number of M-PESA’s 35 million customers.
One of the reasons behind this confidence is the nature of the database, where all the transactions are processed, stored and the balances reflected on the phone.
‘The system that we have today, for example, has one single database that has a standby module, where if that database goes down, we go to the standby module within a period of two minutes or so but what it means is it impacts all customers,” said Felix at an event to explain what the new upgrade means.
With the upgraded platform, he said, the database would be split into sections, called stripe units, which means customes are in different pools and in the event there is a problem, it will be possible for the rest to continue as the problem is fixed.
Esther Waititu, Chief Financial Services at Safaricom, said the platform would now enable the company to provide new solutions without affecting the entire service, is cloud-based, and would use Artificial Intelligence to understand and cater to customers better.
‘Today, on a daily basis as an average, we process 100 million transactions, and that continues to grow as we introduce more use cases and continue to innovate. The desire and the speed of transactions has to increase,” said Esther.
Cloud infrastructure would enable the service to be available uninterrupted, with AI bringing intelligence and efficiency to enhance speed, detect fraud, and protect customers.
The upgrade is more complex than the one in 2015 when the M-PESA platform was moved from Germany to Kenya as the service continued to become more important not only to Kenyans’ lives but to the economy.
From 200 transactions per second at peak demand then, M-PESA now handles up to 4,500 transactions per second at peak time, which is typically at 7 pm in the evening as people make their purchases at shops, pay fares on matatus and order for a cold or warm beverage.
M-PESA was on a Generation 1 (G1) platform between 2007 and 2015.
The platform was upgraded to G2 between 2015 to 2020 and to G3 before Fintech 2.0.
“If you recall, in 2015, 2016, and 2017, we used to have a lot of notifications every other weekend that we are upgrading the system and we would bring down the system to be able to upgrade,” said Felix.
Moving forward, M-PESA will be able to handle around 6000 transactions per second.
This transformation positions M-PESA to meet the growing demands of Africa’s digital economy while preparing for future opportunities.
“With this upgrade, our customers should expect no more delays since we are moving to a system with better capacity. In the next month, you’ll be able to see new features on your wallet. This whole process is expected to make your payment process easier,” said Esther Waititu, Chief Financial Services Officer at Safaricom.
To get here, a lot of sweat and hard work has been happening for the past two years.
“This upgrade has been a work in progress over the past few years with our developers here at Safaricom. To be able to ensure we have the best work, we also flew in 100 partner developers to work with us internally. We also had 300 developers working remotely on this project from different parts of the world,” said Felix.
The Fintech 2.0 platform will embed 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.
The migration to Fintech 2.0 is expected to happen on September 22 from 12.30am to 3.30am.
During this time, all M-PESA services including airtime purchase, shall be temporarily unavailable.
“What informed our decision to do the upgrade at this time is that we don’t have high traffic at the time, the average activity during that window is 300 transactions per second,” said Rop.
The proof, what makes the team sure that the system will come back up more stable and efficient is the testing they have done.
“We have done a couple of tests to see how the system reacts incase of a failure, and the services have continued to run. We also did a cutover test,” said Rop.
Cutover testing is a practice run of the transition process from an old system to a new one, including technical and functional tasks, to ensure a smooth and successful go-live by verifying the new system’s readiness, validating recovery strategies, and coordinating activities within a defined timeframe.
“Based on the tests, it’s clear we will be successful,” Rop said.
M-PESA’s Fintech 2.0 upgrade is the platform’s WeChat moment, as there are clear similarities in the two platform’s growth journeys.
WeChat didn’t get an easy ride when it was launched, it had to fend off dozens of domestic competitors when it was launched, and it had to keep innovating to stay ahead.
For M-PESA, what the upgrade will do for it is make the platform experience more seamless and safer for the customer. A win for everyone.
