When mobile phone usage gained popularity in Kenya, the financial services was revolutionized with the introduction of money transfer using the mobile phones. Among the pioneers of this revolution was the famous M-Pesa technology which gave a new dimension to money transfer, an option embraced by Kenyans especially those with no access to banks in the rural areas or those 'afraid' to use banks.
Despite the success that has come along with the M-Pesa mobile money service in Kenya since inception some years ago, maintaining this service has proved difficult to Safaricom to an extent of contemplating recalling the former Safaricom CEO Michael Joseph with the key role been fixing the continuous problems facing M-Pesa.
M-Pesa has in the past been tauted as the the most successful of these systems, and the first to operate on a large scale. M-Pesa is an initiative between mobile phone giant Vodafone and Kenya's Safaricom.

Recent mobile money Reports in Kenya indicate that Over 50% of the adult population use the service to send money to far-flung relatives, to pay for shopping, utility bills, or even a night on the tiles and taxi ride home.

The report further says that It's not just for customers at the end of the chain. We've seen businesses adopt mobile money to offer various business to business services, for example suppliers collecting payments from distributors via the mobile channel.

M-PESA CHALLENGE:

Despite Safaricom having deployed several redundancy for this lucrative service, Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore laments that the number of people using the service is growing in an anticipated rate that has proved difficult to be supported by the current platform thus forcing Safaricom to seek to overhaul its entire M-Pesa system and replacing it with another one that will put in place scalability factor.

This comes in the wake of the latest outages to hit M-PESA where a breakdown of connectivity between the local servers and the German data centre crippled this popular service early this week. Collymore says it has cost Safaricom millions of shillings since the service is highly relied on by the majority of Kenyans.

Collymore says its has not been a walk in the park for Safaricom since they are facing the backlash from angry subscribers because of the inconveniences Safaricom has caused to them in the resent past.

" As you maybe aware this service was launched in the country by Michael Joseph who up to now remains very passionate about it and it goes without saying that he understands the M-Pesa platform and business implications of such service outages" Collymore said. We are looking at a new platform that will handle more than 200 transactions per second since the service is still not optimal for the current subscriber base.

This are some of the challenges that my predecessor never anticipated that they will hit us but we hope when he comes back he will be in a position to address this challenges.

Tangaza money, Airtel money are the latest entrant to the Kenyan market, and Safaricom launched M-Kesho, a savings account, in partnership with Equity Bank. A variety of mobile financial services are on offer, and you can even pick up your money from an ATM.