Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa has pledged to elevate the company’s mobile money platform, M-Pesa, into its next phase-emphasising the need for stronger cybersecurity and uninterrupted service.
Speaking about the upcoming M-Pesa 2.0, Ndegwa said the upgrade would be rolled out within the next 6 to 12 months, citing an urgent need to “keep ahead of the crooks” attempting to breach their systems.
He added that the upgrade would come with a major shift in reliability, claiming there would be zero downtime during deployment. In contrast, earlier versions of M-Pesa - such as those introduced in 2021 - often required full system outages, with customers unable to transact and banking partners forced to suspend services for several days due to tight integration with the platform.
Currently, downtime during updates averages around 10 minutes, but Safaricom aims to carry out future upgrades without taking the platform offline.
A central focus of the upcoming update will be cybersecurity resilience. Ndegwa explained that making M-Pesa safer “requires a lot of investment, as the core needs to be ring-fenced.” He also noted that Safaricom mobile sites typically have a backup site in place to minimise the impact of any unexpected outages. However, having backup infrastructure also introduces an additional entry point that must be defended against potential cyber threats, adding complexity to the company’s security strategy.
Safaricom currently invests US$300,000 annually in maintaining and updating M-Pesa, which had over 60 million users as of the company’s financial year ending 31 March 2024.
