IBM today announced that Mashreq, one of the leading financial institutions in the Middle East and North Africa, is piloting IBM Bob, IBM’s enterprise AI-powered software engineering platform, to advance its integration engineering capabilities. Through the pilot, Mashreq is exploring how agentic AI can help accelerate software delivery, improve developer productivity and lay the foundation for AI-driven software engineering.
Mashreq has established a modern integration platform that serves as the backbone of its digital banking ecosystem, enabling seamless connectivity across channels, applications, partners and countries. Supporting critical business capabilities, including digital banking, instant payments, cross-border transactions, API-driven ecosystems, and multi-country operations, the platform processes an average of 650 transactions per second across digital channels, payments, and enterprise systems.
To sustain this growth and accelerate innovation, Mashreq is piloting IBM Bob to explore how agentic AI can assist integration teams throughout the software development lifecycle; from solution design and planning to development, code review and production troubleshooting. Activities that previously required two to three hours of manual effort now take minutes, enabling engineers to deliver solutions faster, resolve issues more efficiently, and focus on higher-value innovation. Early pilot results show up to a 60-70% reduction in time spent on integration design and troubleshooting, while increasing developer productivity through AI-assisted decision-making.
“As we continue to advance our digital-first strategy, we are investing in technologies that help our engineering teams move faster while maintaining the resilience and quality our customers expect,” said Mohamed Abdel Razek, Group Head of Technology, Transformation and Information, Mashreq. “Through our pilot with IBM Bob, we’re seeing how agentic AI can help simplify complex integration engineering, accelerate delivery and improve developer productivity. As we continue our AI journey, we’re also evaluating how these capabilities can transform software engineering and operations across the enterprise.”
As part of its broader digital transformation, Mashreq is working with IBM and GBM to modernize the integration platform that underpins its digital banking ecosystem. Using cloud-native integration technologies including IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, IBM MQ, IBM App Connect, IBM API Connect, Red Hat OpenShift and Confluent, the bank is building a scalable, resilient and AI-ready foundation that enables secure connectivity, real-time data movement and enterprise-grade governance.
Mashreq is also leveraging IBM Context Forge, based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), to enable agent-based orchestration across the integration lifecycle. The technology provides AI agents with secure access to enterprise integration knowledge, API specifications,architecture standards and operational context. Through a secure gateway, Mashreq manages about 4,000 requests per month from AI agents to connected digital banking, payments and enterprise systems. This helps the bank explore a collaborative AI environment that can assist engineering teams with design decisions, code reviews, troubleshooting and operational analysis.
“Our vision is to create an intelligent engineering environment where AI agents can work alongside our teams to support design, code reviews and troubleshooting. IBM Context Forge provides the foundation to securely explore this using the enterprise knowledge our engineers rely on every day,” said Santosh Vaidya, Head of Payments and Digital Services, Mashreq.
“The next chapter of AI will require empowering developers and engineers with intelligent agents that can collaborate across complex software engineering workflows,” said Shukri Eid, VP & General Manager, IBM Gulf Levant and Pakistan, IBM. “Mashreq is taking a strategic approach by combining a modern, cloud-native integration platform with agentic AI and IBM Bob to transform how software is designed, developed and maintained. Together, we’re helping build an intelligent digital foundation that accelerates innovation, improves operational efficiency and prepares the bank for the future of AI-driven banking.”
“As UAE banks accelerate their digital transformation and adoption of AI, combining global technology expertise with deep local understanding is increasingly important. At GBM, we bring that perspective to help organizations translate emerging technologies into practical outcomes. We’re proud to work with Mashreq and IBM to explore how agentic AI can help engineering teams move faster, simplify complex integration work and create more capacity for innovation,” said Muralidharan Rajagopalan, Interim General Manager, GBM Dubai.
By combining its high-performance integration platform with its IBM Bob pilot and IBM Context Forge for agentic AI orchestration, Mashreq is laying the foundation for intelligent, agent-based operations that will support the future of digital banking. The bankis also exploring a future on-premises deployment of IBM Bob for mission-critical use cases that may require access to locally hosted models to address data residency and regulatory requirements.
