Safaricom’s Evolution Towards a More Connected Digital Ecosystem with Abacus
Industry Focus and Scope
Safaricom is a leading communications company in Kenya, recognised for its strong network coverage, customer-focused innovation, and the success of M-PESA, one of the world’s most widely used mobile money platforms.
Through M-PESA, Safaricom transformed mobile phones into everyday financial access points for millions of people, expanding access to digital financial services across Kenya and strengthening its role in the country’s digital economy.
As the M-PESA ecosystem continued to grow, Safaricom saw an opportunity to make partner integration faster, more secure, and more scalable. To support this vision, Safaricom partnered with Abacus to establish an API-driven digital foundation that could simplify onboarding, improve service delivery, and enable wider ecosystem innovation.
The Challenge: Scaling Partner Integration Across a Growing Digital Ecosystem
As Safaricom’s partner network expanded, integration became more complex. Bringing new partners and services into the ecosystem required coordination across decentralized systems, which slowed onboarding and made service rollout less efficient.
Multiple tools and platforms with poor integration created operational friction, duplicated effort, higher costs, and greater reliance on manual interventions. This affected business agility and made it harder to introduce new digital services at the speed the market required.
Customer experience was also under pressure. Long resolution times, inconsistent service delivery across channels, and frequent complaints highlighted the need for a more connected, reliable, and scalable digital operating model.
At the same time, M-PESA had significant potential to deepen financial inclusion. To reach more underserved, rural, and unbanked communities, Safaricom needed a foundation that could scale digital financial services while keeping partner access structured, secure, and efficient.
Key Challenges
● Partner Integration: Onboarding new partners and services required lengthy manual coordination across decentralized systems.
● Operational Inefficiency: Multiple tools, legacy systems, and duplicated efforts increased costs and slowed execution.
● Customer Experience: Long resolution times and inconsistent service delivery created friction for customers.
● Financial Inclusion: M-PESA needed to become more accessible to underserved and unbanked segments.
● API Maturity: Safaricom required a stronger API foundation to support governance, scalability, partner innovation, and monetization.
The Solution: An API-Driven Transformation Led by Abacus
Abacus worked with Safaricom to design and implement a scalable API-driven architecture that could support faster partner onboarding, stronger governance, and wider digital innovation.
The engagement began with customer-centric analysis, including the mapping of customer “day in the life” journeys to identify friction points and improve digital service experiences. Based on these insights, Abacus helped create an intelligent digital layer powered by APIs, connecting partners, channels, services, M-PESA, and financial APIs more effectively.
A developer portal was introduced to make partner and developer onboarding simpler, more structured, and more scalable. This created a clearer path for developers to connect with Safaricom’s services and helped support a wider ecosystem of 15,000+ developers.
Daraja 2.0 further strengthened the ecosystem by enabling partner innovation through an API marketplace model, while secure API management and governance helped ensure the foundation could scale with greater reliability and control.
Services & Solutions Delivered
● Developer Portal: Enabled self-service onboarding for partners and developers.
● API Management Configurations: Established secure API management with governance, security, and scalability at the core.
● API Marketplace — Daraja 2.0: Created an open ecosystem to support partner innovation.
● Integration with M-PESA and Financial APIs: Enabled seamless financial transactions and stronger digital financial services connectivity.
● Multi-Cloud Integration: Supported flexibility and reliability across environments.
● SLA-Based Support and Managed Services: Delivered enterprise-grade uptime, reliability, and operational support.
● Customer Journey Mapping and Analysis: Enabled continuous tracking and refinement of customer experiences.
Why Safaricom Chose Abacus
● API-Led Transformation Expertise: Abacus brought the technical depth required to design and deliver a scalable API foundation for a large digital ecosystem.
● Partner Integration at Scale: The solution helped simplify onboarding for thousands of partners and developers.
● Governance and Security Focus: Abacus embedded API governance, security, and scalability into the core of the digital architecture.
● Commercial Enablement: The API foundation supported monetization strategies that contributed directly to B2B and B2C revenue.
● Financial Services Integration: Abacus helped strengthen the connection between M-PESA, financial APIs, partners, and digital services.
Outcome
The transformation marked a significant step in Safaricom’s API-led growth journey. By introducing a more scalable API foundation, Safaricom was able to simplify partner integration, improve service delivery, reduce operational friction, and support wider access to digital financial services.
The impact was measurable. Safaricom integrated 4,500+ partners, onboarded 15,000+ developers, and generated 11% of B2B and B2C revenue through API monetization from 2019.
Beyond the numbers, the transformation gave Safaricom a stronger foundation for innovation. Partner onboarding became more structured, developers gained a clearer route into the ecosystem, and M-PESA’s role as a platform for digital financial access became more scalable.
What began as a need to simplify integration evolved into a broader digital transformation, positioning Safaricom to support ecosystem growth, partner innovation, customer experience improvement, and financial inclusion at scale.