Safaricom starts upgrading its M-PESA platform to support new features & third-party services
Safaricom will on Saturday 9th September 2017 at 10 PM to Sunday 10th September 2017 at 11 AM conduct an upgrade on the M-PESA platform, a decade after Safaricom launched the service and two years after the company deployed a new local platform that has enhanced the system's capacity.
During this period, all M-PESA services will remain unavailable.
"Safaricom has put in place measures to ensure a smooth transition during the upgrade, which will provide our customers and partners with more features and capabilities in the future," said Bob Collymore, CEO, Safaricom.
In August 2017, Safaricom announced the availability of revamped M-PESA Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), providing the capabilities for anyone to build and deploy their solutions on top of the platform.
The enhanced availability of the platform to developers through APIs is expected to usher in an age of increased interconnectivity for M-PESA, which will support a wider range of capabilities for several different partners.
The new platform will also allow the gradual introduction of new features to the service in coming months.
Today, more than 26 million customers use M-PESA, making more than 10.5 million transactions every day. Since its launch, M-PESA has rolled out different innovations to its customers including the Lipa Na M-PESA cashless payment platform, M-Shwari, KCB M-PESA and recently M-TIBA.