Safaricom has announced plans that it has started final preparations for the launch of the 2nd generation of its M-PESA platform.
This comes as the telecommunications giant prepares to perform a full scale system upgrade aimed at improving efficiency and speed over the next week. Safaricom which first announced plans to replace its M-PESA platform in 2014 is seeking to migrate the current platform to an enhanced platform that will allow for faster transactions, improved stability as well as enable more functionality from the service.
“This is a milestone moment for the M-PESA platform as we embark on our final preparations ahead of the full migration process. We anticipate this new platform will unlock a new era of transformational mobile financial services.” said General Manager of Financial Services at Safaricom, Betty Mwangi.
Over the last 6 months, Safaricom has met a number of key milestones as it progresses on its journey to migrate the entire M-PESA platform to Kenya. Some of these include conducting a number of dry runs to ensure that stability and up-time are restored as soon as possible after the migration.
The company will be integrating all existing internal systems including security, redundancy and disaster recovery on the new platform.
The Central Bank of Kenya and the Communications Authority of Kenya have been provided with oversight over the entire migration process to ensure that Safaricom meets its stated goals with minimal customer disruption. It is worth noting that in June 2010, M-PESA transactions amounted to about 70% of the volume of electronic transactions in the country. This is a significant percentage of the number of transactions so it would be prudent for Safaricom to keep M_Pesa online 100% of the time.
“What this means is that we are not only offering faster speeds and more secure transactions to our customers, we are also creating the foundation for a more accessible system that will further enable the rapidly growing mobile money ecosystem in Kenya to continue to grow and be fuelled by locally created solutions,” said Ms. Mwangi.
Additional benefits of the new system will:
- Extend to enhanced system stability due to reduction in points of failure
- Bring functional flexibility that will allow a wider range of customer services
- Allow for easier integration onto M-PESA for 3rd Parties
- Provide an improved business continuity for continued service availability.
