M-Pesa (M stands for mobile, and Pesa means money in Swahili) is a mobile phone-based money transfer, payments, and micro-financing service, launched in 2007 by Vodafone and Safaricom, the largest mobile network operator in Kenya.
M-Pesa has expanded to Tanzania, Mozambique, Lesotho, Ethiopia, and Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It has become the largest mobile payment service that covers the most areas and has the most subscribers in East Africa.
M-Pesa has been stepping up efforts to accelerate digital transformation. However, with fast-growing service needs, M-Pesa had to keep scaling out resources for their traditional on-premises systems, which made management and maintenance more complicated than ever before. Meanwhile, their traditional processes, along with their deployment and testing approaches, needed transformation. And M-Pesa cloud not dramatically improve their customer experience due to their outdated development architecture.
Deploying M-Pesa 2.0 on Huawei Cloud Stack is a significant step in MPA's digital transformation journey. They can now stay focused on service innovation without being chained to infrastructure.
To address these challenges, M-Pesa upgraded their platform to M-Pesa 2.0. M-Pesa 2.0 was designed to provide smarter, more user-friendly services for users in more countries and help M-Pesa Africa (MPA) cut costs and improve efficiency. M-Pesa 2.0 needs to run on a cloud platform that can centrally manage O&M across multiple countries and deliver better scalability and SLAs.
Huawei Cloud Stack is such cloud platform. M-Pesa 2.0 uses Elastic Cloud Servers (ECSs) from Huawei Cloud Stack to support large-scale cluster deployment and multiple specifications. The Elastic Load Balance and Auto Scaling services of Huawei Cloud Stack enable load balancing and elastic scaling for M-Pesa 2.0. The Host Security Service and Web Application Firewall services of Huawei Cloud Stack protect M-Pesa 2.0 from hackers.
Huawei Cloud Stack also provided a unified management platform, ManageOne, for M-Pesa 2.0 to streamline management across multiple countries, improve O&M efficiency, and reduce management costs. The version management consistency enables M-Pesa 2.0 to provide services tailored to different countries, which improves operation experience.