M-Pesa Africa: Award-Winning Enterprise Transformation
This case study documents an award-winning enterprise transformation that redesigned how M-Pesa Africa delivers digital change at scale - spanning operating model, leadership, governance, and people - in one of the world’s most regulated fintech environments.
Strategic Pressure
M-Pesa Africa operates as a joint venture between Safaricom and Vodacom, serving over 50 million customers across Africa. Following its formation, the organisation faced a dual challenge: scaling digital innovation at pace while maintaining trust, resilience, and regulatory compliance across multiple central banks and jurisdictions.
The limiting factor was not ambition or technology — it was how the organisation was structured to deliver change.
Problem
The delivery engine was constrained by siloed agility.
Local markets were optimised for responsiveness, while global platform teams were optimised for efficiency — but the organisation lacked a unifying operating model to align both around shared outcomes.
As a result, delivery performance degraded at scale:
- Excessive time-to-market for pan-African product features, driven by duplicated effort and sequential handoffs
- High operational overhead, with parallel delivery models and inconsistent governance across markets
- Regulatory friction, where cross-market feature parity required repeated approval cycles rather than embedded compliance
These were not execution issues.
They were structural constraints in how the organisation was designed to deliver change.
My Accountability
I was accountable for designing and enabling the enterprise transformation, working directly with executive leadership to re-architect how value flowed from strategy to delivery.
- Defined the target operating model aligned to value streams.
- Introduced Lean Portfolio Management to shift from project funding to outcome ownership.
- Reorganised teams into value-aligned Agile Release Trains.
- Positioned HR as a core transformation lever across talent, performance, and growth.
- Established governance that enabled speed without weakening regulatory control.
Intervention
Where the accountability defined what needed to change, the intervention focused on how the organisation would deliver that change at scale.
Working directly with executive leadership, I designed and enabled a value-stream-aligned operating model that reconciled global platform efficiency with local market responsiveness — without weakening regulatory control.
Key elements of the intervention included:
Operating Model Redesign
Reorganised delivery around clearly defined value streams, replacing project-centric structures with long-lived, outcome-owned teams. This established clear accountability for value, risk, and delivery across markets.
Lean Portfolio Management
Introduced portfolio-level prioritisation and funding aligned to strategic outcomes rather than individual initiatives. This created transparency over demand, capacity, and trade-offs, enabling faster, evidence-based decision-making at executive level.
HR-Led Transformation
Positioned HR as a core transformation partner, embedding talent, performance, and capability development directly into delivery structures. This ensured organisational design, role clarity, and leadership behaviours evolved in lockstep with delivery change.
Governance Embedded into Flow
Shifted governance from episodic review and approval to embedded, flow-based control, allowing regulatory requirements to be met continuously rather than through sequential sign-off cycles.
Leadership Alignment
Established a common cadence and language across executives, product, technology, and operations. Leaders moved from overseeing projects to owning value streams, with direct accountability for outcomes and delivery health.
The intervention was deliberately incremental but structural — solving real delivery problems while progressively reshaping the organisation’s ability to operate at scale.
Outcomes
- Step-change in speed: Deployment cycles reduced from 40+ weeks to 4 weeks or fewer — a ten-fold (~90%) improvement in time-to-market.
- Platform scale: Enabled the launch of Africa’s first M-Pesa Super App across Kenya, Lesotho, Tanzania, Mozambique, and DRC within 18 months.
- Customer adoption & quality: Achieved 10M App Store downloads and a 4.7★ average rating across five countries.
- Commercial impact: Contributed approximately 10% of total company revenue (~$100m), alongside increased transaction volumes and average revenue per customer.
- Organisational effectiveness: Reduced management layers, clarified accountability, and achieved engagement scores above the Global High-Tech benchmark.
- External recognition: Recognised with the HR Excellence Award 2022 – Best Transformation Strategy (pictured right).
Supporting Material
A longer-form video discussion was recorded during the transformation for contextual reference. The written case study above remains the authoritative record of outcomes.