After eight years of Safaricom’s mobile money platform systems operating from Germany, the telecommunications company has contracted 200 experts from Huawei to install a new M-Pesa server that will be located in Kenya.
The move definitely comes with added advantages to the service subscriber as well as the provider with service outages expected to be minimal as well as save costs as Safaricom will now be in charge of maintenance of the services considering it currently pays fees to Vodafone between 10 and 25 per cent of the revenues generated through M-Pesa as royalty fees.
IBM on the other hand has been contracted to maintain the M-Pesa servers in Germany during the process and has in the past three weeks been forced to re-route its international traffic to satellite platforms after its main link to the global network of high speed internet was damaged in deep sea.
Safaricom will only take care of capex and maintenance expenses once the system establishes locally. The firm’s product earned the mobile company sh26.6 billion in the recent financial year that ended March 2014 in which Vodafone’s share is about 15 per cent in royalties.
