For years, Safaricom’s most loyal users have been living a split existence. Heavy-duty financial work — M-PESA transactions, loans, investments — went through the M-PESA app. Airtime, data bundles, account settings, and customer service went through MySafaricom. Two apps, two login experiences, two homes for services that increasingly belong in the same workflow. The friction was small enough to tolerate, significant enough to notice.
My OneApp, unveiled at Safaricom’s Decode 4.0 developer summit in Nairobi this week, fixes it. But calling this a fix undersells what Safaricom has actually built.
What My OneApp Is
My OneApp merges the standalone M-PESA App — which serves 6.7 million users — and the MySafaricom App — which serves 2.8 million — into a single unified platform, currently live on Android in an early access phase with iOS support to follow. For the first time, Kenyan users can see their M-PESA balance, GSM balance, bills, bundles, and the full suite of Safaricom financial services in one place.
“For the first time, customers can see their M-PESA balance, GSM balance, bills, bundles and financial services in one place,” said Safaricom Chief Financial Services Officer Esther Waititu during the live demo at Decode 4.0. “The more you use the app, the more it learns you. It’s not just convergence, it’s personal.”
The AI-driven personalisation is the feature that separates My OneApp from a straightforward product consolidation. The platform learns user behaviour over time — adapting to transaction frequency, preferred contacts, recurring payments, and commonly accessed services. Frequently used features like investments, lending, or bill payments automatically surface on the home screen. Users can customise quick actions, automate bill payments, and access tailored bundles from a single dashboard. Safaricom is also exploring voice-based interaction for future versions, where users could complete tasks without navigating menus at all.
The platform also goes considerably beyond payments and telecom. Financial tools including Ziidi (money market funds), Ziidi Trader (access to the Nairobi Securities Exchange), Fuliza credit, Pochi la Biashara (business income separation), and insurance products sit alongside Baze streaming, gaming, news access, and an expanding library of third-party mini-apps. Safaricom is explicitly positioning My OneApp not as a mobile money tool but as what its executives call a “digital lifestyle ecosystem.”
The Mini-App Architecture Is the Real Bet
The most significant architectural decision in My OneApp is not the merger of two existing apps. It is the mini-app layer underneath it.
Rather than requiring users to download separate applications for individual services, businesses and developers can embed their offerings directly inside My OneApp through Safaricom’s Daraja API ecosystem. The model is directly comparable to WeChat’s mini-programs in China — lightweight applications that run inside a host platform, giving developers instant access to an existing user base without the distribution cost of competing for app store visibility.
The scale of that distribution opportunity is not abstract. “When you create a mini-app on this app, you’ll be able to reach as many as 10 million customers,” Safaricom’s Super App team told attendees during the Decode demo. For a Kenyan startup trying to reach users without a dedicated marketing budget, that is an extraordinary reach proposition.
Daraja 3.0 — the cloud-native rebuild of Safaricom’s developer platform that launched in late 2025 — provides the technical foundation. It supports more than 66,000 integrations and already hosts more than 80 mini-applications within the ecosystem. The platform now includes Security APIs for fraud detection and identity verification, IoT APIs allowing connected devices to make payments, and a redesigned developer onboarding experience designed to reduce the friction that historically made integration slow and discouraging for early-stage startups.
FinTech 2.0 and the Infrastructure Play
My OneApp is the consumer face of what Safaricom is internally calling FinTech 2.0 — a transition of its financial core to a multi-tenant, AI-first platform designed for scale, resilience, and intelligent service delivery. The underlying infrastructure can now handle up to 6,000 transactions per second, up from approximately 100 per second in M-PESA’s earlier years — a 60x improvement that reflects years of platform rebuilding that most users never see.
CEO Peter Ndegwa was unambiguous about the strategic intent at Decode. “We are no longer just a telco. We are becoming a technology company building the intelligent digital infrastructure that will power Kenya’s future.” His framing of Safaricom’s role is consistent with how the company has talked about itself for the past three years — but My OneApp gives that framing a concrete product to point to.
“Our role is to provide the rails. What developers build on top of them will define the next phase of growth,” Ndegwa said. The rails language is deliberate. Safaricom is describing itself as infrastructure, not product — a company whose value accrues through what others build on its platform, not solely through the services it provides directly.
The long-term roadmap makes this clearer. Safaricom is currently running a separate business-focused app for merchants and enterprises. Over time, the company intends to connect the consumer and merchant layers more closely, with mini-apps acting as the bridge — so that consumer demand and business services meet inside a single environment. My OneApp is the entry point. The ecosystem that builds on top of it is the endgame.
What This Means for Kenya’s Digital Economy
For Kenyan developers and startups, My OneApp’s mini-app architecture represents something that has not previously existed in the ecosystem at this scale: a single distribution channel with ten million potential users already enrolled, already transacting, and already accustomed to the platform.
The comparison to WeChat is apt and has limits. WeChat’s dominance in China was built in a market with far greater smartphone penetration and a different competitive landscape. Kenya’s informal economy, its feature phone base, and its highly varied digital literacy mean that My OneApp will need to serve a genuinely diverse user population — something the team acknowledged by noting that USSD and customer care self-service flows within the app are designed to reduce reliance on traditional channels without cutting off users who are less comfortable with complex navigation.
For African fintech founders watching from Lagos, Nairobi, and Accra, My OneApp is also a signal about where the super app race is heading on the continent. The companies that control the payment rails — and the consumer attention that flows through daily financial transactions — are positioning themselves as the operating systems for the digital economy. Safaricom has a structural advantage in Kenya that no startup can replicate from scratch. The question the ecosystem is now asking is whether that advantage produces a thriving platform of third-party innovation, or whether it produces a walled garden that extracts value from the developers who build on it.
The early architecture suggests Safaricom is at least designing for the former. Decode 4.0 brought developers from across Kenya together not just to consume announcements but to build — with Code Labs, Builder Labs run with Huawei, Dell, Microsoft and Google, and satellite Decode Cafés opening in Meru, Homa Bay, and Eldoret to extend the ecosystem beyond Nairobi.
My OneApp is live in early access. The full public rollout will define whether its ambitions survive contact with the ten million people it is now asking to move their digital lives into a single place.
