Efashe Scaled Cost-Effectively With Akamai

Future Dynamic Innovations, part of Efashe Group, is one of Rwanda’s leading fintech aggregators, powering everything from bill payments and utilities top-ups to SMS notifications and alerts for a large portion of the country’s businesses. Its mission is simple yet profound: Make everyday financial services accessible across Africa through mobile phones. With 3,000 agents across Rwanda and growing operations in Malawi and Zambia, Efashe processes more than 10 million SMS messages monthly and drives more than 30 billion transactions annually.

But behind the scenes, Efashe’s ambitions were hitting a wall. Legacy infrastructure was costly, unreliable, and painfully slow to provision. The turning point came when the company moved its workloads to Akamai cloud computing services. With more than 100 Linode servers now in production, Efashe slashed provisioning time to minutes and increased uptime to nearly 100%. It also freed its team to focus on innovating its platform and expanding across Africa while keeping services fast, reliable, and scalable on an affordable Akamai-powered infrastructure stack.

Before migrating to Akamai, Efashe relied on a hybrid infrastructure approach that combined physical servers in colocation data centers with VPS offerings from local providers. This setup offered some redundancy, but created a heterogeneous environment that was difficult to manage and scale reliably.

The cracks showed whenever outages occurred. Efashe’s lean technical team had to manually transition servers and reroute traffic, often leading to extended downtime and missed partner SLAs. “In our business, any delays translate to lost opportunities,” explained Efashe CTO Peter Rutayomba.

Availability hovered around 80%, customer trust eroded with frequent disruptions, and Efashe’s competitive edge dulled. Costs were unpredictable too, swinging between CapEx for new hardware and OpEx for emergency fixes. According to Butera Rutagaramba, CEO of Efashe Group, “Our approach was fundamentally reactive. We were constantly firefighting. That left little room for growth or innovation.”

Efashe turned to Akamai cloud computing services to solve its biggest challenges: availability, cost predictability, and provisioning speed.

• Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE): With LKE, Efashe gained a managed platform for containerized workloads, accelerating deployment and DevOps maturity while ensuring a seamless Kubernetes transition.
• NodeBalancers: These fully managed, high-availability load balancers can be deployed in minutes, replacing other setups that took weeks to configure.
• Block Storage: Efashe eliminated costly hardware cycles with this highly available storage capacity it can expand on demand with just a few clicks.
• Object Storage: This durable, scalable, and cost-effective storage supports cloud workloads while enabling smarter archiving. 
• Cloud Firewalls: These firewalls make it simple for Efashe to control network traffic to and from Akamai cloud resources. 
• VPCs: Using virtual private clouds, Efashe gains intuitive, secure segmentation for running workloads in fully isolated environments, without requiring specialized hardware expertise.
• Backups: With automated backups of disks, Efashe can safeguard data and ensure simple, automated disaster recovery.

Rutagaramba praised Akamai’s design philosophy: “The infrastructure abstractions — from the UI to the APIs — are well thought out, simple, and modern. They enable new engineers without deep hardware knowledge to become productive in days.”

Equally important, Akamai eliminated unpredictable expenses. Unlike its old setup, where hardware failures and provider dependencies created sudden cost spikes, Akamai offers consistent performance and transparent pricing.

The pay-per-use model replaces large CapEx investments with predictable usage-based billing, reducing OpEx by ensuring Efashe pays only for what it consumes. This consistency has enabled more effective budgeting and resource allocation for growth initiatives. “With Akamai, costs are both affordable and predictable,” Rutayomba said.

The reliability and scalability of Akamai’s infrastructure has been critical to Efashe’s regional expansion. “Akamai ensures nearly 100% uptime, and we can spin up a new server in just five minutes instead of five days,” said Rutayomba.

From its Rwanda base, the company has launched operations in Malawi and Zambia — all managed from a single consolidated account. “Akamai has made it simple and cost-effective to quickly expand into new markets,” he continued.

Efashe plans to enter Zimbabwe next, with an eye on scaling into 25+ African countries. “Honestly, without Akamai, it would be impossible for us to achieve our ambitious growth goals, given resource constraints and the complexity of managing infrastructure across multiple African markets,” Rutagaramba added.

Perhaps the most transformative impact of Akamai has been freeing Efashe’s engineers from infrastructure firefighting. Before Akamai, engineers spent nights in colocation centers managing outages and performing manual failovers. Today, they are free to focus on what matters: developing and enhancing Efashe’s core fintech products, while also building new ones like its micro-lending app. The company is even experimenting with Akamai’s embedded database, which has shown faster performance than PostgreSQL in initial trials.

Efashe now serves more than 2 million active customers in a 90-day span. “The secret weapon is Akamai’s technology and support team,” Rutayomba said. “They handle the infrastructure so we can focus on our mission and vision.”

From an unreliable hybrid setup to a cloud native infrastructure foundation, Efashe has undergone a transformation that positions it as one of Africa’s fintech leaders. With Akamai as a long-term partner, the company is not just scaling services but reshaping financial inclusion across the continent.

“Akamai has helped shift us from a company constrained by infrastructure to one rapidly expanding across African markets, turning technology into a competitive advantage instead of an operational burden,” said Rutagaramba.

As Rutayomba put it: “Akamai makes us feel like long-term partners, not just customers. Together, we can power financial innovation across Africa.”