Super apps in Africa are no longer theoretical. With the launch of My OneApp, Safaricom has taken a decisive step toward building a unified digital platform that combines payments, telecom services, and AI into a single experience — a move that could redefine how fintech ecosystems evolve across the continent.
For years, loyal Safaricom users lived a quietly fragmented digital life. Heavy financial work — M-PESA transactions, loans, investments — happened in one app. Airtime, data bundles, account settings, and customer service lived in another. Two logins. Two home screens. Two experiences that, as Safaricom’s own team put it at their annual developer summit, users loved individually but didn’t love having to switch between.
That friction ended on April 1, 2026.
At Safaricom’s Decode 4.0 summit at Sarit Expo Centre in Nairobi, the company unveiled My OneApp — a single, AI-powered platform that merges the standalone M-PESA app and the MySafaricom app into one unified interface. It is, by any measure, Safaricom’s most consequential product decision in years. And for the broader African fintech ecosystem, it is a signal worth taking seriously.
What Are Super Apps — And Why Are They Rising in Africa?
Super apps are platforms that combine multiple services — payments, messaging, commerce, and financial tools — into a single application. Popularised by companies like WeChat in China and Grab in Southeast Asia, the model is now gaining traction in Africa. West African super app Gozem has been quietly building this model across Francophone Africa, while Ghanaian fintech PayBox has launched a super app developer programme targeting 14 African markets.
The rise of mobile money, increasing smartphone penetration, and fragmented digital services have created the perfect conditions for super apps in Africa to emerge. Safaricom’s My OneApp is one of the clearest signals yet that the continent is entering this phase.
What My OneApp Actually Does
The product description is deceptively simple: one app for everything Safaricom. But the execution goes well beyond a UI consolidation.
My OneApp brings together M-PESA payments, airtime and data bundles, bill management, savings and investments, lending, insurance, and entertainment under a single roof. For the first time, users can view their M-PESA balance, GSM balance, active bundles, bills, investment positions, and lending options from a single dashboard without switching between applications.
“For the first time, customers can see their M-PESA balance, GSM balance, bills, bundles and financial services in one place,” said 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.”
That personalisation is the feature that separates My OneApp from a straightforward product merge. The platform uses AI to learn 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 has also said it is exploring voice-based interaction for future versions, where users could complete tasks without navigating menus at all.
The financial services suite embedded in the app is extensive. Customers can invest in money market funds via Ziidi, trade shares through CD Trader, access overdraft credit via Fuliza, ring-fence business income using Pochi la Biashara, and buy device or income-protection insurance products — all without leaving the app. Entertainment services including Baze, gaming, and news access sit alongside these financial tools, alongside more than 80 third-party mini-applications already integrated into the ecosystem.
The app also brings self-service capabilities that were previously only possible through USSD codes or call centres. Biometric authentication, fraud reporting, PIN recovery, and network diagnostics are all accessible directly within My OneApp — a meaningful quality-of-life improvement for a user base that has historically had to navigate fragmented support channels.
The Infrastructure Behind the Interface
My OneApp is not just a UX decision. It sits on top of a significant platform rebuild that has been underway for years.
Safaricom’s upgraded architecture now supports up to 6,000 transactions per second — up from roughly 100 per second in M-PESA’s earlier years. That 60x improvement reflects a multi-year transition to what the company is internally calling FinTech 2.0: a move of its financial core to a multi-tenant, AI-first platform designed for scale, resilience, and intelligent service delivery.
Underpinning all of this is Daraja 3.0, the cloud-native rebuild of Safaricom’s developer API platform that launched in late 2025. The platform supports more than 66,000 integrations and hosts the 80-plus mini-apps that sit within the My OneApp ecosystem. It introduces Security APIs for fraud detection and identity verification, IoT APIs that allow connected devices to make payments, and a redesigned developer onboarding experience designed to reduce the integration friction that historically made it slow and discouraging for early-stage startups to build on M-PESA’s rails.
Together, My OneApp and Daraja 3.0 represent what CEO Peter Ndegwa described as a fundamental identity shift for the company. “We are no longer just a telco,” he said at the summit. “We are becoming a technology company building the intelligent digital infrastructure that will power Kenya’s future.”
Super Apps in Africa: Platform Economics, Local Context
The strategic logic behind My OneApp borrows from a well-established playbook — one written in Asia. WeChat in China and Grab in Southeast Asia demonstrated that the company which controls the daily interface captures an outsized share of the economic relationships that flow through it. Whoever owns the interface often owns the customer relationship.
Safaricom has a structural advantage that no startup can replicate from scratch: a deeply embedded payments network through M-PESA, an unmatched agency distribution system across Kenya, and over 6.5 million monthly active users who already transact on its platform daily. By collapsing its services into a single intelligent interface and opening the ecosystem to developers through Daraja 3.0, Safaricom is not just building a better app. It is building a platform — and daring everyone else in the ecosystem to find ways to plug into it, or match its breadth.
“In digital ecosystems, whoever owns the interface often owns the customer relationship,” observed one analysis of the launch. “This is no longer just fintech. It’s platform economics.”
The transition is also a bet on behaviour. My OneApp shifts the user experience from a static, menu-driven model to a predictive one — an app that reorganises itself around each user over time. For a company with millions of daily transactions flowing through its infrastructure, that behavioural data is an extraordinary asset. It is the same logic driving Africa’s broader 2026 consolidation wave, where payment giants are systematically acquiring infrastructure layers to dominate the full financial stack.
What Super Apps Mean for African Fintech
For fintech founders watching from Lagos, Accra, Kigali, and Johannesburg, My OneApp carries a clear message: the companies that control payment rails — and the consumer attention that flows through daily financial transactions — are positioning themselves as the operating systems of the digital economy.
Africa’s fintech ecosystem has remained relatively fragmented, with startups, banks, and telcos each controlling different pieces of the value chain. My OneApp changes the competitive geometry in Kenya. It signals that the next phase of the continent’s digital economy will be shaped not by standalone services, but by ecosystems — and that the organisations best positioned to build those ecosystems are the ones that already sit at the centre of financial life. Lagos’s rise as Africa’s fastest-growing tech ecosystem is a case study in exactly this dynamic, where fintech companies that own the payments layer have built the widest moats.
Safaricom’s move positions it at the center of the emerging super apps in Africa landscape, where a single platform increasingly controls multiple layers of the digital economy.
For fintech startups in Kenya specifically, the calculus is nuanced. Safaricom’s Spark Accelerator, now in its second cohort, has already demonstrated a model where startups can integrate directly into the M-PESA ecosystem — HealthX Africa expanded its subscriber base by 40% through integration with M-PESA consumer mini-apps, and Chumz grew its user base to over 300,000 and expanded into Rwanda after leveraging Safaricom’s platform. For founders willing to build within the ecosystem rather than against it, My OneApp and Daraja 3.0 represent genuine distribution infrastructure.
The harder question is what happens to the apps and services that compete with features Safaricom is now building natively — savings tools, investment platforms, insurance products. The line between platform and competitor is one that tech giants globally have struggled to walk cleanly. It is the same tension surfacing in the Flutterwave-Mono acquisition, where owning the infrastructure layer puts a payments company directly adjacent to the startups that built on top of it.
As super apps in Africa evolve, the companies that own daily user interactions — payments, communication, and services — will likely define the next decade of digital growth. Africa’s tech funding rebound in 2025 — up 36% year-on-year to cross the $3 billion mark — means the capital is now available to accelerate exactly these kinds of platform bets.
Safaricom has acknowledged the limits too. Kenya’s informal economy, its substantial feature phone base, and its varied digital literacy mean that My OneApp must serve a genuinely diverse user population. The company has retained USSD and customer care self-service flows within the app precisely to avoid cutting off users who are less comfortable with complex smartphone navigation — a recognition that building for Africa means building for everyone, not just the smartphone-first urban middle class.
The View From Here
My OneApp is currently available in an early access pilot phase on the Google Play Store for Android, with iOS access to follow. That measured rollout suggests Safaricom is prioritising reliability over speed — a sensible call for a platform on which millions of Kenyans depend for their financial lives.
What is already clear is that Safaricom’s ambitions have outgrown the telco category entirely. With My OneApp, Daraja 3.0, a $500 million technology investment plan through 2026, and 25 years of M-PESA’s trust embedded in the platform, Safaricom is not asking to be considered a tech company. It is simply building like one — and watching the rest of the continent decide how to respond.
Read the original breaking news coverage: Safaricom Just Merged M-PESA and MySafaricom Into One App. The Super App Era in Africa Is Here.
FAQ: Super Apps in Africa
What is a super app?
A super app is a platform that combines multiple services like payments, messaging, and commerce into one application.
Are super apps growing in Africa?
Yes. Companies like Safaricom are leading the rise of super apps in Africa by integrating financial and telecom services into unified platforms.
Why are super apps important for Africa?
They reduce fragmentation, lower costs, and improve access to digital services across markets with limited infrastructure.
My OneApp was launched at Safaricom Decode 4.0 on April 1, 2026, in Nairobi, Kenya. The platform is currently in pilot phase on Android.
