At least 35 million M-pesa users will be left without services on Sunday as Safaricom announces new upgrade for its mobile money platform.

The three hour upgrade begining thirty minutes past midnight will see the giant telecom move M-pesa core system from the current Generation 3 to homegrown system, Fintech 2.0, which incorporates cloud services, artificial intelligence and expanded microservices.

Safaricom says the new system comes with advanced AI anti-fraud system which will help in among others, monitor threats, track and boost response time.

“With the data driven insights that we will be getting on the new platform, we will start learning the patterns of transactions, that is basically how you transact. In the event that we see anything that is off at a given time you may see your transaction being blocked,” said Felix Rop, Safaricom Head of Financial Services Information Technology.

Among fraudulent activities the new system is SIM swap which Safaricom says makes up a portion of at least 20,000 SIM swaps which the firm processes daily.

“With the Fintech 2.0, one of the biggest components with benefits is the anti-fraud solution sitting in the core system. We will be able to run a scan using the AI capability to determine the quality threshold for the SIM swaps,” said Esther Waititu, Safaricom Chief Financial Services Officer

Official data indicates that Safaricom commands lion’s share of the the mobile money market which as of March this year  stood at 45.4 million.

The planned upgrade is also expected to ensure higher transaction capabilities from the current peak capacity of 5000 transactions per second to 10,000 transactions per second.

“The volume we are experiencing is quite high and part of what we are trying to do is move into cloud services to become more efficient,” she added.