Safaricom To Relocate Its M-Pesa Servers From Germany To Kenya
Safaricom the mobile service carrier turned mobile money mogul, and the pace setter internationally for mobile money services, has announced its plan to scale up its M-Pesa platform. The telecom wants to roll out its second-generation M-Pesa services and is currently undertaking a full-scale system upgrade. This is part of the company’s plans to relocate its servers from Germany to Kenya.
“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, the General Manager – Financial Services at Safaricom.
Over the last six months, the company has been putting in place measures to ensure there will be a smooth migration of entire M-Pesa platform for hosting in Kenya. It has also carried out a number of dry runs as a way of ensuring that the services’ stability and uptime are not compromised after the migration. It will incorporate all its existing internal systems such as security measures, redundancy and disaster recovery on the new platform.
To ensure that M-Pesa users are not interrupted by the new move, the Communications Authority of Kenya and Central Bank of Kenya will oversee the migration to ensure users are not affected negatively.
Mwangi further said, “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.
Safaricom is said to enhance the platform’s stability, reducing the points of failure, improve functional flexibility that will enable them give a wider range of services to customers, 3rd parties’ smooth integration into the M-Pesa platform. The new platform is expected to go live by the end of April 2015. A big part of this upgrade involves relocating its M-Pesa servers from Germany to Kenya.
“Previously, we used to have speeds of up to 450 transactions per second but with the new platform we will do 900 transactions per second”, said Mwangi.
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