Safaricom has unveiled a significant upgrade to its developer gateway, Daraja 3.0, marking a fundamental shift in how businesses integrate with the M-PESA ecosystem.
The latest version of the platform moves away from being a simple payment bridge to becoming a cloud-native architecture designed to host services directly within the M-PESA Super App.
This technical leap, described by the company as a move into “Fintech 2.0,” is intended to provide businesses with instant reach to millions of users while simultaneously slashing distribution costs and improving system responsiveness.
The journey toward this upgrade began in 2017 when Safaricom first launched the Daraja portal named after the Swahili word for “bridge.”
At that time, it served as a modest gateway that enabled third parties to link to M-PESA, reducing the integration time from more than 60 days to a much more streamlined process.
As Eric Nyaga, Product Owner for Daraja, noted of the early vision: “So the plan was to have a way that automates, one, how the developers access the APIs… It gives you the end-to-end overview of what it is that you need as far as the integration project process is concerned.”
Following a surge in adoption, Daraja 2.0 was introduced in 2019 to enhance customer experience, but version 3.0 represents a far more ambitious overhaul of the system’s core.
Technologically, Daraja 3.0 is built on a modern foundation that Safaricom says delivers higher uptime and stricter compliance with global security standards.
The upgrade introduces a suite of “Security APIs” specifically engineered to bolster fraud detection, prevention, and identity verification.
These enhancements are designed to give integrators the confidence to build and scale services quickly, with the platform capable of supporting a milestone of 10,000 transactions per second by January 2026.
Consequently, developers can now deploy “Mini Apps” that live inside the main M-PESA interface, creating a more seamless experience for the end consumer.
Furthermore, this upgrade is a central pillar of Safaricom’s broader strategic ambition to transition from a traditional telecommunications provider into Africa’s leading “purpose-led technology company” by 2030.
By expanding the API ecosystem with advanced product capabilities, the firm is opening new opportunities for sectors ranging from retail to the public sector to develop secure, Sector-specific solutions.
As the developer community remains instrumental to this growth, Daraja 3.0 is positioned not just as a tool for payment processing, but as the primary engine for driving smarter and more inclusive financial digital services across the region.
The transition from Daraja 2.0 to 3.0 represents a fundamental shift in philosophy, moving from a platform that merely handles payments to one that powers entire businesses within the M-PESA ecosystem.
Architecturally, the platform has evolved from a legacy proxy system—often restricted by on-premise or hybrid limitations—to a cloud-native, auto-scalable foundation.
This modern infrastructure allows the system to handle massive traffic spikes, such as those seen during Black Friday, ensuring near-zero downtime.
Consequently, transaction speeds have seen a significant boost, jumping from a peak of approximately 6,000 transactions per second (TPS) to over 10,000 TPS, with the capacity to scale further to 12,000.
One of the most transformative aspects of this upgrade is the “Super App” strategy, which changes how businesses host their services.
Previously, under Daraja 2.0, developers were limited to external hosting on their own websites or mobile apps. With the 3.0 upgrade, businesses can now build and host services natively as in-app mini programs within the M-PESA interface.
This allows even small enterprises to reach millions of users instantly without the prohibitive costs of building and distributing a standalone application.
Furthermore, the onboarding process has been revamped from a manual approval system to a fully self-service model, drastically reducing the time it takes for a business to go live.
Security and integration have also undergone a major overhaul to meet global standards. Version 3.0 introduces specialized Security APIs for real-time fraud detection and identity verification, allowing developers to verify customer details instantly and mitigate risks for e-commerce and lending platforms.
To support these new capabilities, the platform provides AI-powered developer support and a redesigned sandbox environment. This testing suite allows engineers to simulate complex, multi-step transaction flows with much higher accuracy than the static documentation provided in the past.
Additionally, the new version introduces dedicated IoT payment APIs, opening the door for automated machine-to-machine transactions that were not supported in the previous iteration.