Safaricom is set to increase by twofold the capacity on its M-Pesa mobile money service, according to an interview with CEO Bob Collymore by IT Web Africa.

The operator, which is facing growing competition in the money market, is expected to boost its capacity in early 2015, said Collymore (pictured).

Safaricom is upgrading its existing infrastructure, including moving back M-Pesa’s servers from Europe to Kenya.

“The current platform is dimensioned to cope with just over 300 transactions per second. The new platform will be launched with a 600 transaction per second capability but scalable to meet increasing demand,” Collymore said.

The upgrade is also intended to build more robustness into the M-Pesa system.

Safaricom hopes to drive more traffic by having local businesses integrate M-Pesa into their services. The operator plans to offer an API for M-Pesa to developers.