Safaricom is no longer just a telecommunications and mobile money provider; it is rapidly transforming into a full-scale tech giant with the ambition of becoming the digital operating system for daily life in Kenya. This vision was front and center at the Decode Summit in Nairobi, where the company officially unveiled “My OneApp.” By merging the popular M-PESA app with the MySafaricom platform into a single, AI-driven super app, Safaricom has placed itself at the heart of the country’s evolving digital economy.
This move is about far more than just combining two platforms. Esther Waititu, the Chief Financial Services Officer, explained that the goal is to weave intelligence into every part of the customer experience. Unlike traditional apps that offer a static menu, My OneApp uses artificial intelligence to learn and adapt to user behavior. It prioritizes the services a person uses most, whether that is recurring bill payments, specific lending habits through Fuliza, or investment activities, effectively reorganizing the interface in real time to suit the individual.
This shift represents a major leap from a simple transactional tool to a predictive ecosystem. For years, Safaricom’s various services were somewhat fragmented across different apps and USSD codes. My OneApp collapses those barriers, bringing together everything from airtime management and insurance products to share trading through CD Trader and small business tools like Pochi la Biashara. By owning this single, integrated interface, Safaricom is securing its relationship with the customer across every aspect of their financial and lifestyle journey.
Behind the scenes, a massive infrastructure upgrade supports this digital leap. Safaricom has overhauled its systems to handle up to 6,000 transactions per second—a staggering increase from the 100 transactions per second seen in its earlier years. This high-capacity, AI-first architecture is designed not just for today’s needs, but as a foundation for a future where third-party developers can build new innovations on top of Safaricom’s rails. With over 66,000 integrations already supported via the Daraja API platform, the company is positioning itself as the backbone of Kenya’s tech scene.
The broader strategy here is a move from simple financial inclusion to true financial power. While M-PESA famously helped drive Kenya’s financial inclusion rate from 23% to 84% in less than twenty years, the new focus is on wealth creation and resilience. By embedding tools for money market investments via Ziidi and various credit options directly into a daily-use app, the company is encouraging users to move up the economic ladder rather than just facilitating day-to-day spending.
As Safaricom takes this bold step, it sets a high bar for the rest of Africa’s fintech and telecom sectors. While the “super app” model has seen massive success in Asia with platforms like WeChat, the African market has remained relatively fragmented. By integrating such a wide breadth of services into one intelligent platform, Safaricom is betting that users will choose a single, personalized ecosystem over a screen full of separate apps. If this gamble pays off, the company will do more than just dominate payments; it will define how a new generation interacts with money and digital services
