Safaricom is set to turbocharge its M-Pesa mobile payment platform by increasing its transaction capacity to 8,000 transactions per second (TPS) by end of 2026—double its current peak of 4,000 TPS.

This is a big jump from 2015 when M-Pesa’s capacity was 616 TPS. By April 2026, Safaricom will hit 6,000 TPS and by end of the year 8,000 TPS.

M-Pesa Current Capacity:

  • Per second: 4,000 TPS
  • Per minute: 240,000 TPS
  • Per hour: 14.4 million TPS
  • Per day: 345.6 million TPS
  • Per week: 2.4 billion TPS
  • Per month (avg. 30.33 days): 10.5 billion TPS
  • Per year (364 days): 125.8 billion TPS

M-Pesa is moving fast to keep up with demand and position itself for future growth in digital finance in Africa.

Cloud-Native Upgrade for More Flexibility

This is more than just a number increase; it’s a shift to a 100% cloud-native architecture. This means more scalability, uptime and flexibility to support growing demand for digital financial services.

“We’re going into a new M-Pesa very soon,” says Felix K. Rop, Head of Financial Services Technology at Safaricom. “It will be highly configurable, secure and resilient built for the future of digital finance in Africa.”

Strategic Growth with Forecasted Demand

Felix explains the growth isn’t just because of current usage but a proactive approach based on forecasted demand. This is important as M-Pesa sees high activity even during off-peak hours with the platform handling 300 TPS at 1 AM on weekends.

Reliability and Performance Improvements

M-Pesa has come a long way. From a 16-core database to a 64-core database with sharding technology to boost performance and reliability. M-Pesa currently supports 45,000 integrations, 100,000 developers, and more than 10 internal systems including Zidisha and Fuliza.

Seamless Disaster Recovery and High Availability

One of the key benefits of the new platform is disaster recovery. M-Pesa now runs in three environments—production and two disaster recovery environments. If one environment is compromised, traffic can be switched to another in under 4 minutes. If a database fails, it switches to standby in less than a minute for continuous availability.

Maintenance and Uptime: A Top Priority

With over 240,000 customer requests per minute, M-Pesa’s uptime is crucial. The platform does system upgrades almost every other week and still maintains high uptime and service continuity. Safaricom knows a single minute of downtime can affect hundreds of thousands of users.

Building for Africa’s Digital Future

With its plans to grow M-Pesa, Safaricom is positioning itself as a major player in Africa’s digital finance space. The new platform is designed to handle current traffic and scale as digital finance grows across the continent.

This sets the bar high for mobile financial platforms and shows Safaricom’s commitment to providing reliable, secure and innovative solutions for millions of Kenyans and Africans.