This has been a song for a few years now but today Safaricom said it has brought its M-PESA servers home and is working on opening its API to third-party application developers.
The firm is also set to do a full scale system upgrade aimed at improving efficiencies and speed over the next week.
Hosting M-PESA at home will mean 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 Betty Mwangi, General Manager – Financial Services, Safaricom.
Over the last six months, the giant telco says it would have brought the entire M-PESA platform to Kenya, including conducting a number of dry runs to ensure that stability and uptime 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.
“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; functional flexibility that will allow a wider range of customer services; easier integration onto M-PESA for 3rd Parties; and improved business continuity for continued service availability.