Kenyan operator Safaricom has revealed that it has finalised the transfer of its M-Pesa servers to Kenya. According to the company, service outages on the mobile money service should be reduced now that M-Pesa is hosted locally within Kenya.
According to the company, it was previously hosted in Germany and was prone to interruptions whenever undersea fibre cables were damaged. Following the migration, Safaricom temporarily shut down all M-Pesa transactions from 23:00hrs on 18 April for testing before switching it back on 19 April at 11:30 hrs – half an hour earlier than the operator had scheduled.
According to a report by Business Daily, the operator said that the “second generation” M-Pesa platform has a bigger capacity, is much faster and cushioned from interruptions. The speed of the M-Pesa service will double to 900 transactions per second, according to Safaricom’s general manager for financial services Betty Mwangi-Thuo.
The process of installing the M-Pesa servers locally began 24 months ago, with Safaricom having brought in 50 engineers from across the globe, mainly from Vodafone, IBM and Huawei to design and install the new platform and re-locate the servers locally. The M-Pesa service has about 19 million customers and 81,000 agent outlets.
Staff Writer
