Safaricom’s 25-year milestone has arrived with a quiet but decisive shift in Africa’s digital finance landscape. The company has unveiled Fintech 2.0. A first major rebuild of the M-PESA Core since 2015 and its most ambitious engineering project yet. The upgrade is designed to meet the rising pressure on mobile money infrastructure as digital payments expand across the continent.
At its core, Fintech 2.0 raises M-PESA’s throughput from 4,500 to 6,000 transactions per second, with headroom to reach 12,000. It also moves the system into a cloud-native environment with distributed hosting, near-zero downtime targets, and new AI-powered tools for fraud detection and real-time monitoring. For Africa’s largest mobile money network, the shift is as much about scale as it is about resilience.
“This upgrade is a bold investment in the future of M-PESA… unlocking a platform that not only scales to meet today’s demands but also anticipates tomorrow’s opportunities,” said Safaricom Group CEO Dr. Peter Ndegwa.
The timing is strategic. M-PESA processed 37.15 billion transactions worth KES 38.29 trillion [USD 292.3 billion] in FY2025, with revenue rising 15.1 percent to KSh 161.1 billion. These numbers underscore its role as Safaricom’s primary growth engine across payments, savings, lending, insurance, and e-commerce.
Strategic Market Rebundling
The broader market context sharpens the picture. Africa recorded USD 1.1 trillion in mobile money transactions in 2024. A figure expected to quadruple by 2033. Newer fintech players Wave, OPay, PalmPay, and Moniepoint—are scaling fast. A more adaptive, high-capacity M-PESA positions Safaricom to defend and grow its footprint in an increasingly crowded field.
Yet the deeper signal lies beneath the technical upgrade. Fintech 1.0, defined by single-purpose financial apps, solved friction but left users juggling fragmented services. Fintech 2.0 shifts toward “rebundling” bundling savings, payments, credit, and commerce into a unified, intelligent ecosystem. With richer transaction metadata and AI-driven architecture. Safaricom is preparing M-PESA to enable personalised credit scoring, smarter merchant tools, and financial access for underserved groups.
The upgrade pairs with the new Daraja 3.0 API platform, launched during the anniversary celebrations. It offers a cloud-native developer environment, Mini App capabilities, improved documentation, and AI-supported onboardingpaiming to reduce friction for businesses building on M-PESA.
As M-PESA grows in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, DRC, Lesotho, and Ghana, Fintech 2.0 marks the start of a more connected financial decade. Safaricom’s anniversary is not just a celebration, it is a reset for Africa’s fintech future.
