IN SHORT: Safaricom said its unified My OneApp platform reached 4.7 million registered users as of June 29, as the telecom accelerates plans to phase out its legacy M-Pesa and MySafaricom applications. The platform records about 1.3 million daily active users and nearly three million monthly active users. My OneApp consolidates mobile connectivity and financial services into a single interface and introduces stricter security through SIM-binding, which links the app directly to a user’s physical SIM card to block remote fraud. Safaricom has begun displaying migration banners in the legacy apps and plans to remove them from app stores. The rollout, first unveiled at the Decode 4.0 summit in April, initially faced authentication failures, missing transaction data and Wi-Fi incompatibility, issues Safaricom says are now largely resolved. Safaricom posted a net profit of KES 99.7 billion for the year ending March 2026.
Safaricom is consolidating Kenya’s most important digital financial infrastructure into a single application, with My OneApp reaching 4.7 million registered users as the company moves to decommission the standalone M-Pesa and MySafaricom apps that millions of Kenyans have relied on for daily payments, a transition that carries both significant fraud-prevention benefits and real execution risk given the app’s troubled April launch. The June 29 update from Safaricom’s Head of Digital Commerce and Loyalty Services Peter Gichangi confirms the migration is progressing despite the early technical difficulties that generated widespread customer complaints.
- The adoption numbers show meaningful traction: 4.7 million registered users, 1.3 million daily active users and nearly three million monthly active users. These figures represent a substantial share of Safaricom’s digitally active customer base migrating within roughly three months of the app’s April launch. The company plans to eventually remove the legacy M-Pesa and MySafaricom apps from app stores, making My OneApp the primary digital access point for its more than 10 million app users.
- The security architecture is the strategic justification for the consolidation. My OneApp is directly linked to a user’s physical SIM card through SIM-binding, which prevents access and financial transactions if the SIM is not present on the device. This is designed to block the social engineering fraud that has plagued Kenyan mobile money, where fraudsters use stolen credentials or secondary devices to access accounts remotely. By requiring the physical SIM, Safaricom raises the barrier to unauthorised access significantly.
- The app’s launch in April was genuinely troubled, and the history matters for assessing the migration. When Safaricom triggered automatic migration via app updates on April 3, users faced login failures, wiped transaction data including saved paybills and till numbers, and an inability to use the app over Wi-Fi. The SIM-binding requirement that provides the security benefit also locked out diaspora users who rely on Wi-Fi or roaming. Safaricom issued a formal public apology on April 16. Engineering teams have since resolved the Wi-Fi connectivity issues and restored missing functions.
- My OneApp is the consumer expression of Safaricom’s FinTech 2.0 strategy, which repositions the company from a mobile network operator into a platform business. The app is built on cloud-native infrastructure rated at 6,000 transactions per second and hosts more than 80 third-party services. It embeds the Ziidi money market fund and share-trading tools directly into the M-Pesa flow, giving users access to investment products alongside payments. The platform is designed for multi-country deployment, positioning Safaricom for expansion of the model into Ethiopia and other markets.
- Future development includes machine learning integration to personalise financial services. Gichangi said the app will generate automated reminders for recurring utility payments, recommend nearby merchants based on location and transaction history, and develop a digital directory of Lipa na M-Pesa businesses. These AI features are intended to transform My OneApp from a transaction tool into a predictive financial assistant, deepening the platform’s role in users’ daily financial lives.
- The financial context underscores the stakes. Safaricom posted a net profit of KES 99.7 billion for the year ending March 2026 on group revenue exceeding KES 414 billion, with M-Pesa alone generating KES 182.7 billion in revenue. The Kenyan operations offset KES 21.2 billion in losses from the Ethiopia expansion. M-Pesa is the single most valuable asset in Safaricom’s portfolio, which makes the successful migration to My OneApp a high-stakes exercise: any disruption to M-Pesa functionality directly threatens the company’s most important revenue stream.
The My OneApp migration echoes the super-app strategy that MTN is pursuing with its Ant International partnership for MoMo, which Africaspoint covered. Both reflect the same recognition: pure mobile money is commoditising, and the value is moving to the platform layer that aggregates payments, lending, insurance, investment and lifestyle services. Safaricom’s advantage is M-Pesa’s dominance in Kenya, where it processes a significant share of the country’s GDP through mobile money. The risk is that forcing migration from a beloved, reliable app to a new platform, before that platform has fully proven its reliability, could erode the trust that made M-Pesa dominant in the first place.
The Bigger Picture: Safaricom’s My OneApp migration is a case study in the difficulty of upgrading critical financial infrastructure that millions of people depend on daily. M-Pesa is not just an app in Kenya; it is the rails on which a large share of the economy runs. Consolidating it into a super app with embedded investment products, AI features and stronger security is strategically correct: it defends Safaricom’s fintech dominance against banks and neobanks building competing products. But the April launch demonstrated the risk of moving too fast with infrastructure this critical. The 4.7 million users who have migrated represent progress. The test is whether Safaricom can complete the transition, decommission the legacy apps, and maintain the reliability that made M-Pesa the trusted backbone of Kenyan daily commerce. Execution, not strategy, is the challenge.
Source: Capital FM, June 29 2026 / Capital FM, June 29 2026
