Business
SAFARICOM ANNOUNCES 3-HOUR MPESA SYSTEM UPGRADE TO FINTECH 2.0
Safaricom announced a scheduled system upgrade for its M-PESA, a step in its evolution to meet the growing demands of the Kenyan market. The maintenance window is set for Monday 22nd September 2025, from 0:30 AM to 3:30 AM.
During this three-hour period, all M-PESA services, including sending and receiving money, paybill, buy goods and airtime purchase, will be temporarily unavailable. The timing has been carefully selected to minimise disruption to the platform’s over 30 million users.
This upgrade, dubbed Fintech 2.0, it is driven by the need to support Kenya’s rapidly evolving digital economy, where transaction volumes have skyrocketed from an initial 100 transactions per second to a current peak of 4,500 TPS, handling up to 100 million transactions daily.
Key enhancements under the Fintech 2.0 upgrade include:
Increased Transaction Capacity: The system’s capacity will be upgraded from 4,500 transactions per second (Tps) to 6,000 Tps, future-proofing the platform to handle continued growth.
Microservices Architecture: The adoption of a microservices architecture will make the platform more agile, allowing for the faster rollout of new innovative solutions and services without disrupting the entire ecosystem.
Scalable Cloud Infrastructure: Migrating to a more scalable cloud infrastructure will provide the flexibility and reliability needed to support this exponential growth efficiently.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): The platform will leverage AI to provide personalised user experiences, proactively detect and prevent fraudulent activity, and enhance overall transaction speed by instantly identifying and rectifying performance issues.
