Safaricom will now host the servers for its M-Pesa services in Kenya. The highly successful money transfer service systems are currently being hosted in Rackspace servers in Germany.
This will address a number of limitations caused by foreign hosting and open M-Pesa to more innovations. Today, the company announces that M-Pesa is back home. The process is in it’s final testing stages to go live in Kenya and this will impact on speeds of service and efficiency.
The move to host M-Pesa services in Kenya adds benefits like enhanced system availability by reducing points of failure, access of M-Pesa integration by third parties to enhance connection to more services and even open up more opportunities for scalability.
Safaricom has 19 million customers on M-Pesa and 81,000 M-Pesa agents and the service forms majority of the money transfer within the country. Safaricom realises that there are still strides to be done in financial inclusivity and as CEO Bob Collymore says nine out of 10 money transactions are in cash. There has been a move to get government services to run via M-Pesa and more needs to be done.
