Safaricom will conduct a major upgrade of its M-Pesa payments platform over the next three weeks, paving the way for a roll-out of “more features and enhancements to more than 26 million customers”.

The company said in a statement it would be third major upgrade since launch 10 years ago, and the first since Safaricom migrated the platform to Kenya in 2015.

The operator said customers will be able to benefit from an increased number of partners offering their services via the mobile money service, made possible through a new set APIs to simplify the process of integrating with M-Pesa.

In addition, it said automation of different M-Pesa procedures “will eliminate the current requirement for customers and merchants to make such requests to the call centres”.

The new platform also means a number of M-Pesa services will be withdrawn in the lead-up to the changeover, which would be communicated to customers in due course.

Bob Collymore, CEO of Safaricom, said the upgrade represents the “next phase of M-Pesa and will enable the service to deliver even more value for our customers and partners”.

As a result of the upgrade process, all M-Pesa services will be unavailable for a period of two hours on 30 June, added Safaricom.

The company was forced to issue an apology in April after the service faced a 24-hour outage.