Safaricom to Hide Sender Phone Numbers in New M‑Pesa Privacy Update

Safaricom has announced some major changes in the offing for its super popular mobile money platform M-Pesa — a privacy update that will conceal the sender's phone number when money gets transferred.

This is part of a major effort by the company to step up user privacy — and it's coming at a good time given that M-Pesa is about to hit its 19th birthday.

Protecting Customer Data

The company released a statement from its CEO Peter Ndegwa, saying that keeping customers' information safe was a top priority for the organization. Ndegwa acknowledged that as the digital payments space continued to grow, customers expected their privacy to be protected.

For Ndegwa, a huge part of that is about building trust with all the people who use M-Pesa. After 19 years in operation, he believes the company still has a responsibility to continue earning the trust of its customers.

Not Giving Out Full Details by Default

So, from now on, whenever you receive money on M-Pesa, you won’t automatically get the sender’s name and number. Instead, you’ll only see limited information — enough to help you identify the sender, but not more than is deemed reasonable.

The effort is geared about reducing how much personal information people are exposed to when they’re sending or receiving money on the platform. It’s also partly based on customer feedback, which showed that users were concerned about how much of their information was being shared when they used M-Pesa.

Wanting to See More Info?

If you need to know who sent you money, the option will still be there, however, you can only do so - request the sender’s full details — within 24 hours after receiving the money.

How it works is that, you can send a request asking for more information, and the sender will receive a notification asking whether they are willing to share their full name and number. If they agree, you'll then receive the information via SMS — but if they decline, or don’t respond within two hours, the request will simply expire.

Bringing It All Online

Safaricom is planning to introduce the new feature in stages to make sure everything runs smoothly. The company hopes to get it up and running sometime before the end of March, with more phases to follow that will eventually make it available to all M-Pesa users.

It’s another example of how Safaricom is working to balance security, convenience, and user privacy on one of Africa’s most widely used mobile money platforms — a significant development for the millions of people who rely on it to manage their finances.