Safaricom is working to keep its mobile money platform M-PESA at the core of Kenya’s digital payments even as more transactions move from consumer apps to backend software that businesses run.
About 25% of all M-PESA transactions now move through application programming interfaces (API), according to figures shared by the company’s chief financial services officer, Esther Waititu, at an event in Nairobi on Tuesday. The figures show how deeply businesses have wired M-PESA into payments, credit, logistics and public services.
Daraja, the payments portal developers use to plug M-PESA into their systems, has now been fully upgraded to version 3.0 after a March announcement. Safaricom says the overhaul was in response to the shift toward API-driven transactions, with the new platform built for faster rollouts and smoother onboarding, which matters in a community where setup delays and friction have been common.
“Daraja 3.0 is a gateway to the next frontier of fintech,” Waititu said, framing the upgrade as part of a wider push to modernise M-PESA’s technical core.
The scale behind those changes sets the stakes, considering M-PESA processes over 100 million transactions a day and peaks at 6,000 transactions per second (TPS). Safaricom said the new platform can support up to 12,000 TPS, but will first hit a 10,000 milestone in January 2026. The Daraja ecosystem includes more than 66,000 integrations and over 105,000 developers.
Read more: https://techcabal.com/2025/11/25/safaricom-overhauls-m-pesa-api-platform/
