M-Pesa platform migration completed – servers relocated to Kenya

Kenyan operator Safaricom has revealed that it has finalized the transfer of its mobile money M-Pesa platform 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. The platform’s servers were previously hosted in Germany and as a result, the platform was prone to interruptions whenever undersea fiber cables were damaged.

Following the migration, Safaricom temporarily shut down all M-Pesa transactions on 18 April for testing before switching it back on 19 April.

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 transferring the M-Pesa platform’s servers to Kenya began 24 months ago and involved 50 engineers that designed, installed and re-located the servers into a data center in Nairobi. The M-Pesa service has about 20 million customers and 81,000 agent outlets.