M-PESA Services To Be Unavailable Periodically Over The Next Three Weeks Due To Upgrade

M-PESA services will be unavailable for a period of two hours on June 30, 2017, from 1 am to 3 am, Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore has said.

The outage will be as a result of an upgrade process which will see the telecommunication giant move to a new mobile money transfer platform.

International Money Transfer (IMT), KCB M-PESA, M-Shwari and M-Kesho services will be unavailable on July 5, 2017, at the same time period. Due to the same changes, those services will be unavailable in mid-July, resulting in a 12-hour outage.

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In a statement on Thursday, Collymore said the “major upgrade” will begin on Friday and take place for the next three weeks.

“A number of M-Pesa services will be withdrawn in the lead to the changeover,” the statement said. It, however, noted that there will be communication to M-PESA customers and partners through the media and Safaricom social chaels.

The new M-PESA platform will enable Safaricom to roll out more features and enhancements on the service to its more than 26 million M-PESA customers. Among the new features that customers can look forward to include M-Shwari and KCB M-PESA implementation in the Safaricom app.

“Ten years ago, we began the journey of M-PESA by focusing on our customers’ need to send money home. Since then, we have experienced tremendous growth as the platform has grown to provide even more value to the ecosystem. This upgrade paves the way for the next phase of M-PESA and will enable the service to deliver even more value for our customers and partners.” said Bob Collymore in the statement.

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Following the upgrade, M-PESA customers are set to benefit from an increase in the number of partners offering their services on the enhanced M-PESA platform.

This will be made possible through a new set of APIs (Application Program Interface) that will simplify the process of integration into M-PESA, cutting down the time it takes from weeks to a few days or even hours.

In addition to providing for new customer features, automation of different M-PESA procedures will eliminate the current requirement for customers and merchants to make such requests to the call center.