Safaricom’s M-Pesa Gears up for 1,200 Transactions Every Second

Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore recently said that the telco is expanding its M-Pesa systems to take 1,200 transactions per second.

In a statement, he attributed the recent outage that lasted four hours to the system upgrade.

Latest Communications Authority telecommunication sector statistics shows that Safaricom carried out 575,660,251 M-Pesa transactions, moving at least Sh1.58 trillion between July and September.

“We are trying to improve the capacity of the M-Pesa system so that we can deal with up to 1,200 transactions because the system is growing,” Collymore said yesterday.

The 2018/19 first quarter statistics shows that Kenyans made 730 million mobile money transactions between July and September 2018. The transactions were valued at Sh2.02 trillion.

In the review period, Airtel made 4.62 million transactions valued at Sh1.15 billion.

It was followed by Equitel money with 149,463,508 transactions valued at Sh439.188 billion.

Number of registered mobile money agents grew slightly during the quarter under review to 218,495 from 206,940 in June.

In terms of market share, Safaricom PLC shed 1.2 per cent during the period to stand at 64.2 per cent whereas Airtel Networks Limited gained 0.9 percentage points to post a market share of 22.3 per cent.

On the other hand, Telkom Kenya Limited, Finserve Africa Limited and Mobile Pay Limited recorded market shares of 9.0, 4.2 and 0.2 per cent respectively.