The upgrade, dubbed Fintech 2.0, moves Africa’s second-largest mobile money service to a cloud-native architecture, allowing it to process 6,000 transactions per second at launch, with the potential to double as demand rises.

“The scheduled M-PESA upgrade was successfully completed and all services fully restored. All M-PESA services are now available. We look forward to serving you better and providing you with seamless experiences,” the telco said in a tweet.

The migration addresses long-standing limitations. The previous system, operating near a 4,500-transactions-per-second ceiling, left little room for growth. Fintech 2.0 leverages microservices hosted on Huawei Cloud, enabling Safaricom to update individual components without taking the platform offline, a major step for reliability and speed.

Sources familiar with operations say engineers are monitoring live transactions to detect irregularities, a process expected to last several days. Other insiders indicate that the operator now aims to accelerate integrations with banks, fintechs, and developers, opening the door for new APIs, merchant credit products, and cross-border payment solutions.

M-PESA handles more than 21 billion transactions annually, serving over 50 million users across Africa, including payments, remittances, credit, and e-commerce. The upgrade is expected to strengthen its operations as a regional financial backbone, particularly for small businesses and cross-border trade, aligning with goals under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

Competition is getting higher. Airtel Money and other digital-first fintechs have steadily expanded, putting pressure on M-PESA’s top place. The upgrade is not just a technical improvement, but aims to maintain leadership across the market.

In modernising its infrastructure, Safaricom positions M-PESA as a more agile, scalable, and partner-friendly platform. This change reflects the vision first backed by late CEO Bob Collymore, who framed the company’s future as a platform play rather than a closed service. 

With digital payments growing ever more competitive, Fintech 2.0 could enhance mobile money in Africa.

Called Fintech 2.0, the product was announced at AfricaCom. 

The solution will also empower micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) to digitally transform, and provide service providers with greater business agility.  In doing so, Huawei believes it will accelerate industry innovation and digital financial inclusion in emerging markets.

Fintech 2.0 brings value to mobile fintech operators through an extremely digital experience, accelerated innovation, and expedited time to market.

In terms of digital experience, the solution’s digital architecture allows operators to ensure that the overall experience is tailored to every aspect of a customer’s life and combines simple and fast payment and lending.

Additionally, it allows for accelerated innovation by simplifying application development for MSMEs. Developers are able to reuse available industry assets including custom templates and components to rapidly build service applications using the best visual tools with minimal coding.

Fintech 2.0’s open ecosystem, meanwhile, allows operators to bring apps to market faster. By bringing together API, H5, and mini apps technologies, it ensures that partners can launch the service on a super app within one week and take marketing campaigns from idea to launch within three weeks. With a cloud-native platform, the solution supports container/micro-service, auto-scaling, and gray release and enables software updates in days.

“We were pleased to announce the launch of Fintech 2.0 at AfricaCom”, said Bryan You, Director of Huawei Southern Africa Software Solution and Marketing. “Huawei continues to invest heavily in Fintech research and innovation, creating solutions to help address global challenges and support anticipated future developments.”

“Huawei’s Fintech solution uniquely combines the strengths of agile business development, rapidly scalable platform, finance grade regulatory and security compliance and finally, accurate real-time risk control, to safely accelerate digital financial inclusion, enabling access to the growing digital economies for every person and organisation,” he adds.

At present, Huawei’s Fintech solution serves more than 400 million users in more than 20 countries. Through contactless online payment, the solution has helped reduce the economic impact of the pandemic, and in many countries, aids governments in providing subsidies to tens of millions of citizens and education allowances for millions of students. It has also helped create hundreds of thousands of jobs for women and provided financial services such as micro-credit to those who most need it.    

Fintech 2.0 aims to build on this legacy and help provide secure, stable, and trusted platforms to ensure the safety and security of mobile financial businesses. Through its use of advanced connectivity and platforms, Huawei hopes to assist financial institutions in building digital business processes, implementing digital financial inclusion services, and achieving sustainable financial development.

Bryan You, Director of Huawei Southern Africa Software Solution and Marketing