Safaricom bringing MPESA servers home from Germany

Safaricom has announced that the transfer of M-PESA servers from Germany to Kenya will be complete in the next few days.

According Financial Services General Manager Betty Mwangi, the transfer which involves a full scale upgrade of the M-PESA system “is at the last stages.”

The changes are aimed at allowing faster transactions, improved stability as well as enable more functionability from the service.

“The consistent growth of M-PESA subscribers and transactions have necessitated the need for us to introduce a new platform and more importantly bring it home, to Kenya from Germany,” Mwangi said on Wednesday.

The ongoing migration of M-PESA servers to Kenya which kicked of two years ago, will bring to an end almost eight years of foreign hosting since the world-famous product was launched in 2007.

The company will be integrating all its existing internal systems including security, redundancy and disaster recovery on the new platform.

Safaricom says Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) and the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) have been keenly monitoring the whole process to ensure that the telecom completes the transfer without disrupting the customers.

“What 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,” she said.

With more flexibility, the telecom giant hopes to see more regional expansion with MPESA.

However, despite local hosting there will be no international interruption.

Launched in March 2007, MPESA now has over 19million customers and over 81,000 agents outlets countrywide.

SOURCE:CAPITALFM