Kenya's leading mobile operator Safaricom announced that it has started with final preparations to migrate the entire mobile money service, M-Pesa, to the East African country.

Last year Safaricom announced that it would replace its M-Pesa platform and migrate the current platform to an enhanced platform.

In a statement Safaricom stated that the second generation M-Pesa platform would allow for faster transactions, improved stability as well as enable more functionality.

"This is a milestone moment for the M-Pesa platform as we embark on our final preparations ahead of the full migration process. We anticipate this new platform will unlock a new era of transformational mobile financial services," said Betty Mwangi, general manager of financial services, Safaricom.

Safaricom plans to integrate all existing internal systems including security, redundancy and disaster recovery on the new platform.

The Central Bank of Kenya and the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) have been provided with oversight over the entire migration process to ensure that Safaricom meets its stated goals with minimal disruption to the customer, reads the statement.

"What this means is that we are not only offering faster speeds and more secure transactions to our customers, we are also creating the foundation for a more accessible system that will further enable the rapidly growing mobile money ecosystem in Kenya to continue to grow and be fuelled by locally created solutions," said Mwangi.

The East African telco says it has more than 21 million customers, and its M-Pesa service has over 19 million subscribers and over 81,000 agent outlets countrywide.