Kenyan provider Safaricom is to upgrade its mobile money system M-Pesa to a new platform that will increase processing capacity over an 18-month project.
Once the new system is in place, customers will be able to settle post-paid electricity bills, insurance premiums and bank payments in real-time.
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According to Business Daily Africa, former Safaricom chief executive Michael Joseph has said that the new platform is to come with additional functions that will allow M-Pesa to integrate with other vendors, such as retailers, and eventually offer in-store payments.
The new platform is expected to process 10 times as many transactions as the current platform, which deals with 200 to 300 per second.
Chinese telecoms company Huawei has been selected by Safaricom to handle the migration, with the first phase set to be completed by the fourth quarter of the year.
It currently takes 48 hours for payments made to electricity distributor Kenya Power to appear on the systems, and 76 hours for payments made to the National Hospital Insurance Fund.
M-Pesa servers will be relocated to Kenya from Germany as part of the upgrade.
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