A few weeks after Safaricom, Kenya’s biggest telecommunication company experienced an outage on their mobile money service, M-Pesa, the telco has now announced a plan to upgrade its systems.
Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore in an official statement said that the mobile network is expanding its M-Pesa systems to take 1,200 transactions per second.
He further said that while M-Pesa’s system has received continuous system upgrades and innovations over the 11 years of its existence, the latest system’s failure resulted to the outage that lasted for hours.
Latest Communications Authority telecommunication sector statistics shows that Safaricom carried out 575,660,251 M-Pesa transactions, moving at least Ksh. 1.58 trillion between July and September.
“We are trying to improve the capacity of the M-Pesa system so that we can deal with up to 1,200 transactions because the system is growing,” Collymore said yesterday.
The 2018/19 first quarter statistics shows that Kenyans made 730 million mobile money transactions between July and September 2018. The transactions were valued at Ksh. 2.02 trillion.
Bob Collymore also said that the firm is continuously looking for opportunities for innovations and partnership that drive positive impact on its customers by enabling them to conduct financial transaction anywhere in the world.
He added that M-Pesa had opened up the global marketplace to both enterprise and retail customers by deriving value from partnerships with PayPal and Western Union.