Safaricom is doubling down on its mobile money platform, M-PESA, as digital payments increasingly move from consumer apps to business-run backend systems.
About 25% of all M-PESA transactions now flow through application programming interfaces (APIs), highlighting how deeply businesses have integrated the platform into payments, credit, logistics, and public services, according to Esther Waititu, Safaricom’s Chief Financial Services Officer.
To support this shift, Daraja, the payments portal that developers use to connect M-PESA to their systems, has been fully upgraded to version 3.0. The overhaul, announced in March, is designed for faster rollouts and smoother onboarding a response to years of friction in setup processes and integration delays.
“Daraja 3.0 is a gateway to the next frontier of fintech,” Waititu said, framing the upgrade as part of a broader effort to modernize M-PESA’s technical backbone.
The scale of the system is massive. M-PESA processes over 100 million transactions daily, with peaks of 6,000 transactions per second (TPS). The upgraded platform will eventually support up to 12,000 TPS, targeting 10,000 TPS by January 2026. The Daraja ecosystem already includes more than 66,000 integrations and over 105,000 developers.
Globally, payment APIs are growing at 17.5% annually, and Africa’s fintech market is projected to expand fivefold by 2028. Messaging APIs alone account for 36% of revenue in global marketplaces, Safaricom notes, underscoring the commercial potential of these integrations.
The shift toward API-driven transactions also exposes the platform’s evolving governance needs. Integrators have long raised concerns about slow support, patchy documentation, and inconsistent communication. Waititu acknowledged these tensions and promised tighter governance, clearer escalation paths, and improved support.
“It’s no longer just Safaricom at the centre of M-PESA’s digital future,” she said. “Developers are critical to the platform’s growth. Our invitation is to build together, challenge us to be better, and accelerate innovation.”
The Daraja 3.0 upgrade marks a pivotal moment: a recognition that M-PESA’s continued dominance depends as much on its developer ecosystem as on the telco’s own engineering teams.
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