Decode summit in Nairobi on April 1, 2026/HANDOUTSafaricom is repositioning itself at the centre of Kenya’s next financial revolution, declaring that the future of digital finance will be powered not just by mobile money but by artificial intelligence, API-driven infrastructure and intelligent rails.
At the Decode summit in Nairobi, speaking on the transformation, SuperApp CoE lead safaricom Peter Gichangi framed it as a shift from telco to technology company.
Also speaking at the event, Chief Financial Services Officer Esther Waititu detailed the architectural overhaul behind FinTech 2.0, noting that it positioned Kenya within a global transition toward AI-native financial systems.
Waititu emphasised that the next chapter of Kenya’s digital economy will be built at the intersection of AI and APIs.
From telco to technology infrastructure
Gichangi opened the strategic framing by situating Safaricom’s evolution beyond connectivity.
“We are no longer just a telco,” he said.
“We are becoming a technology company building the intelligent digital infrastructure that will power Kenya’s future.”
That infrastructure, he explained, must do more than connect people.
It must enable developers, businesses, and financial institutions to build on scalable, secure platforms that adapt to AI-native systems.
“Our role is to provide the rails,” Gichangi added.
“What innovators build on top of those rails will define the next phase of economic growth.”
That positioning moves Safaricom from being a service provider to being what executives repeatedly described as foundational infrastructure, the layer upon which autonomous commerce, embedded finance and AI-driven services can operate.
The global shift: AI + APIs
The urgency behind that shift was reinforced by Technical Director, Office of the Chief Tech, Google, Jack Ngare, who mapped out the global transformation reshaping software systems.
The API economy, currently valued at $63 billion, is projected to reach nearly $246 billion by 2030.
At the same time, AI adoption among developers has accelerated dramatically; 92 per cent of developers now use AI tools in their workflows, and approximately 26 per cent of production code is written by AI systems.
“AI tools and APIs are converging to define the next generation of systems,” Ngare said.
“If you are building at the intersection of AI and APIs, you are building in the right place.”
He described a transition away from purely deterministic systems, rule-based, hard-coded workflows toward hybrid architectures that combine probabilistic AI reasoning with deterministic API execution.
AI models generate insights, predictions and recommendations.
APIs ground those outputs in verified systems of record payments, identity, compliance and transaction processing.
“Middleware as we know it is disappearing,” Ngare said.
“AI agents can now communicate directly with APIs.”
That convergence enables what technologists refer to as agentic ecosystems, networks of specialised AI agents capable of planning, reasoning and executing complex tasks autonomously.
In financial services, that could mean automated compliance validation, dynamic credit risk modelling, fraud monitoring and personalised financial advisory operating in real time.
Enter FinTech 2.0
Waititu outlined how Safaricom has rebuilt its financial core to align with this AI-first future.
After 18 years of M-PESA expanding financial access, driving Kenya’s inclusion rate from 23 per cent to 84 per cent, the company entered what it now calls FinTech 2.0 in September last year.
“Digital inclusion was the foundation,” Waititu said.
“Financial health is the destination.”
The transition involved a structural overhaul:
· Migrating to a multi-tenant architecture
· Embedding AI into the core platform
· Scaling transaction capacity from roughly 100 transactions per second to 6,000
· Integrating intelligence into Daraja 3.0, Safaricom’s API platform
The scale matters; at 6,000 transactions per second, M-PESA increasingly resembles a national payments infrastructure rather than a telecom product.
“We are not just building apps,” Waititu said.
“We are building a digital lifestyle ecosystem.”
That ecosystem now includes investment products, securities trading via CD Trader, money market fund access through Ziidi, enhanced credit services including Fuliza, insurance products and merchant solutions, all sitting on top of upgraded rails designed to handle AI-driven orchestration.
Intelligent rails, not just payments
Safaricom’s framing of “intelligent rails” signals a deeper ambition, according to Waititu.
Traditional financial rails move money from point A to point B. Intelligent rails monitor behaviour, detect anomalies, personalise services and adapt dynamically.
Under FinTech, AI-driven fraud detection models monitor transaction patterns.
Compliance processes can be automated, and risk assessment can be recalibrated continuously using behavioural signals.
Ngare encouraged developers to see this infrastructure as a research and innovation foundation.
“You can build globally relevant scientific innovation from the realities of our ecosystem,” he told engineers, arguing that local transaction data and API ecosystems can power advanced neural networks and scalable financial models.
Rather than consuming global AI products, he suggested, Kenya has the infrastructure to contribute to global AI systems.
APIs as economic multipliers
Daraja 3.0 sits at the centre of this strategy.
With more than 66,000 integrations already built, the API platform allows third-party developers, startups and enterprises to plug directly into Safaricom’s financial and identity systems.
Gichangi described that openness as critical to economic resilience.
“If we open up our platforms responsibly and securely, we multiply innovation,” he said.
“We cannot build everything ourselves. The ecosystem must build with us.”
In practice, that means AI agents developed by startups could access payment APIs directly.
Credit scoring engines could plug into transaction histories. Agricultural fintech solutions could integrate lending and insurance within unified workflows.
The financial system becomes programmable.
The first chapter of Kenya’s mobile money story was about sending money home.
The next, Gichangi argued, is about investing, insuring, borrowing responsibly and building wealth.
“As we open smarter and more inclusive rails, we are moving from survival to prosperity,” Gichangi said.
The framing is deliberate. With financial inclusion largely achieved, the economic challenge shifts toward productivity, SME growth, and capital formation against shocks.
AI-native infrastructure, they argue, provides the foundation for that transition.
Decode 4.0’s day two sessions made one point repeatedly: Kenya is no longer merely catching up in fintech innovation.
With scalable digital rails, high API penetration and widespread developer engagement, the country now sits at a rare convergence point, where AI adoption, mobile penetration and financial infrastructure overlap.
“If you combine AI capability with strong API infrastructure, you create autonomous systems,” Ngare said.
“And autonomous systems change industries.”
For Waititu, the bet is clear that by embedding intelligence into its rails and opening its platforms to developers, it can anchor Kenya’s position in that transformation.
If FinTech 1.0 connected the country, FinTech 2.0 aims to make it programmable, intelligent and economically generative.
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