**Safaricom to Expand Data Minimisation Across M-PESA by Year-End** Safaricom, Kenya's largest telecoms operator, plans to extend data minimisation across its mobile money service M-PESA by late 2026. This move will limit the exposure of customer phone numbers in mobile money transactions, including bank transfers and merchant payments. According to Esther Waititu, chief financial services officer at Safaricom, the change will ensure that customer data is consistently protected across all platforms. The decision to expand data minimisation comes after the company's earlier update scheduled for March 24, when Safaricom will begin masking part of a sender's phone number in peer-to-peer M-PESA transactions. This initial phase targets one of the most common ways personal data is misused in Kenya's payments system. By extending masking to merchant payments and cross-platform transfers, Safaricom aims to cut off a major source of such data at scale. Merchant payments, handled by Safaricom's Buy Goods and Paybill services, are a key area where customer data is still widely exposed. These services typically send merchants SMS confirmations that include customers' full phone numbers, which are often reused for spam, marketing, and fraud. To address this issue, Safaricom will ensure that customers still complete payments and merchants receive confirmation, but full phone numbers will no longer appear in SMS alerts. The expansion will also include cross-system payments, which involve transfers between M-PESA, banks, and other mobile money services, such as Airtel Money. These transactions pass through several platforms, creating points where data can be viewed or stored. By applying the same limits across these flows, Safaricom aims to reduce exposure at each stage and establish a common standard for providers handling the transaction. The scale of M-PESA means that the change will be widely felt, as the service processes 37 million daily peer-to-peer transactions worth KES 27 billion ($209 million), out of a total of 137.9 million transactions valued at KES 118 billion ($914 million). Safaricom's data minimisation push has developed over several years, starting with the launch of Pochi La Biashara in 2020, a product designed to allow small traders receive payments without exposing full customer details. The company has since reduced internal access to customer data, trimmed personal information from M-PESA statements, and added controls to merchant-facing APIs used by large organisations.