Safaricom Group CEO Peter Ndengwa.

M-PESA, Africa's most successful mobile money platform, is undergoing major upgrades, with a whopping $300 million (Ks40 billion) set aside for the project.

Last week, Safaricom Group CEO Peter Ndengwa announced that M-PESA 2.0 will be upgraded this year, describing it as "the next big leap that will boost stability, capacity, and overall customer experience."

He declared: “By the time it’s fully rolled out, there will be zero downtime for customers. Safety and security are always our top priority.”​

Ndengwa continued: “To maintain customer trust, we stay ahead of fraudsters and cyber threats, with strong guardrails in place and ethical hackers testing our systems. We're constantly building resilience so customers can rely on our services with confidence.”

This comes as Safaricom’s M-PESA celebrated its 18th anniversary this year, having launched in March 2007.

M-PESA is currently available in over 170 countries, with over 70 million customers globally.

The mobile financial services company also now serves over one million businesses and agents in Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lesotho, Ghana, and Egypt.

The service also supports over 55,000 integrations on its Daraja platform, which hosts over 100,000 developers, resulting in a robust innovation environment.

With a current capacity of 4000 transactions per second, the platform conducts about 100 million transactions each day, cementing its position as Africa's leading fintech solution.

The company said is consciously scaling the M-PESA platform to enable more digital services, speed up the development of new products, and improve overall stability and reliability.