Designing & building for tomorrow: M-Pesa’s next chapter

By Athumani Mlinga

There is a well-known dilemma in technology leadership: do you wait for a system to fail before you replace it, or do you invest in modernization while everything still works? The first approach is cheaper in the short term. The second is harder to justify on a spreadsheet. But when the system in question processes billions of financial transactions each year for millions of Tanzanians, there is only one responsible answer.

Next month, we are undertaking a $28 million migration of M-Pesa from its legacy G2 infrastructure to a next-generation fintech platform. It is one of the most significant technology projects in our company’s history, and I would argue, one of the most consequential fintech infrastructure investments Tanzania has seen. But the decision to undertake it was not driven by a crisis. It was driven by the understanding that M-Pesa is an engine for the economy and livelihood.

Consider the trajectory. Between 2021 and 2025, active mobile money accounts in Tanzania more than doubled, from 35.3 million to 76.5 million. Annual transaction volumes grew from 3.75 billion to 6.31 billion. Tanzania’s population stands at 71 million and is growing at nearly three percent annually. GDP growth is projected at 6.3 percent for 2026. Smartphone penetration crossed 41 percent by the end of 2025, and 5G coverage now reaches 30 percent of the population.

What these numbers describe is an economy that is digitizing at extraordinary speed. Mobile money moves from being a supplement to Tanzania’s financial system, to a system for everyone. A 2025 GeoPoll survey on Tanzania Financial Services and Usage, found that ninety-four percent of the respondents use mobile money, and more than 60 percent use it every day. For a platform operator, this is a mandate to invest.

The legacy G2 platform has served us well. It is the foundation on which M-Pesa grew from a simple transfer service into a comprehensive financial ecosystem supporting payments, savings, credit, and enterprise solutions. But infrastructure that was designed for an earlier era of demand cannot be expected to absorb the volume, velocity and complexity of what Tanzania’s digital economy is becoming. Asking it to do so would be irresponsible.

From a technology perspective, the new platform will deliver three critical improvements. First, capacity: the upgraded system will process thousands of transactions per second, a threshold designed to accommodate current demand and the growth we anticipate over the coming years. Second, resilience: the new active-active architecture will allow us to perform maintenance and deploy new features with minimal service disruption. Downtime will be reduced from hours to minutes. Third, agility: the modern architecture will significantly shorten the cycle between developing a new product and delivering it to customers. The new architecture will compress those timelines substantially, enabling us to respond to customer needs and market opportunities with far greater speed.

Enhanced security features will also provide an additional layer of protection for customer data and transactions. In a world where digital fraud is growing in sophistication, this is not optional. It is foundational.

Technology infrastructure decisions are, at their core, customer decisions. Every choice we have made in planning this migration, the investment level, the architecture, the testing rigor, the HyperCare protocol, has been anchored in a single question: what does this mean for the person using M-Pesa?

For the small trader in Mwanza receiving payments from a supplier in Dar es Salaam, it will mean a more reliable service with fewer interruptions. For the agent in Dodoma processing cash-in and cash-out transactions throughout the day, it will mean a platform that can handle volume spikes without slowing down. For the enterprise partner integrating M-Pesa into their payment systems, it will mean better reporting, greater transparency, and a more dependable foundation to build on.

Tanzania’s digital economy is still in the early chapters of its story. Mobile money transaction volumes grew 69 percent between 2024 and 2025. Merchant acceptance of digital payments doubled. Cross-border payment corridors are being established with neighboring economies. The government’s Vision 2050 framework explicitly envisions a trillion-dollar economy powered in part by digital financial infrastructure.

The platform we are building is ready for that future. Not because we can predict every product or service it will need to support, but because we are designing it to adapt. That is the difference between legacy infrastructure and modern architecture. One is built for what you know, the other is built for what you cannot yet imagine.

We are not rebuilding M-Pesa’s engine because it has broken down. We are rebuilding it because Tanzania’s growing population and economy deserve infrastructure that is as ambitious as they are. That is what customer centricity looks like when it is measured in investment.

Athumani Mlinga is the IT and Billing Director at Vodacom Tanzania PLC, where he oversees IT technology infrastructure, including M-Pesa.