Mashreq Bank’s experience with the IBM Bob platform embodies a breakthrough in integrating intelligent agents into the core of digital banking transactions to enhance productivity and processing accuracy.
Details of the partnership between Mashreq Bank and IBM
Software development lifecycle and problem-solving coverage
Smart context tools and automated request governance
Infrastructure upgrade and digital data sovereignty
Frequently asked questions
Details of the partnership between Mashreq Bank and IBM
Mashreq Bank, one of the leading financial institutions headquartered in Dubai, has begun a pilot implementation of the advanced “IBM Bob” AI software engineering platform to modernize and manage the integration and connectivity systems that form the backbone of its growing digital banking operations. The partnership was announced on Monday, October 12, 2026, with initial results revealing a noticeable drop in the time bank engineers spend designing integrations and troubleshooting, ranging between 60% and 70%.
The targeted integration platform serves as the backbone of Mashreq Bank’s digital ecosystem, handling an average of 650 banking transactions per second across various digital channels, payment systems, and core enterprise systems. Tests showed that complex tasks that used to take engineers between two to three hours of intensive manual work are now completed in just a few minutes thanks to intelligent processing.
Software development lifecycle and problem-solving coverage
The bank deployed the Bob platform to cover all stages of the software development and modernization lifecycle, starting from the initial design of engineering solutions and architectural planning, through coding and rigorous technical code reviews, to discovering and resolving complex operational issues in the live production environment.
Mohammed Al-Razzaq, Group Head of Technology, Transformation, and Information at Mashreq Bank, stated: “Through our practical experience with the IBM Bob platform, we are seeing firsthand how agentic artificial intelligence can contribute to simplifying complex integration engineering, accelerating the service delivery cycle, and raising developer productivity rates to unprecedented levels.” Meanwhile, Shukri Eid, General Manager of IBM in the Gulf, Levant, and Pakistan, emphasized that the next phase requires empowering engineers with software agents that collaborate with them in the most complex work environments.
Smart context tools and automated request governance
The bank also adopted the “IBM Context Forge” tool built on the open Model Context Protocol, which gives AI agents secure and controlled access to design standards, API architecture, and the organization’s operational context. An advanced security gateway manages and audits approximately 4,000 monthly requests sent by intelligent agents to Mashreq’s payment and bank account systems to ensure transaction safety.
This project comes within a broader modernization initiative implemented by the bank in cooperation with IBM and systems integrator GBM, relying on the Cloud Pak for Integration software suite and open-source monitoring and connectivity services to enhance agility and responsiveness.
Infrastructure upgrade and digital data sovereignty
Mashreq Bank is exploring the future deployment of the Bob platform within its own private on-premises servers to meet data sovereignty requirements and compliance with strict local regulatory and banking frameworks, as on-premises operation enables the use of locally hosted models that prevent sensitive data from leaving national borders.
IBM introduced the on-premises and isolated sovereign cloud deployment option for the Bob platform in early October to meet this growing demand in vital sectors, following the platform’s launch as a cloud service last April and the addition of multi-agent features in July. Santosh Vaidya, Head of Payments and Digital Services at Mashreq, stressed that the strategic goal is to establish a smart engineering environment where agents collaborate with human teams to create a qualitative leap in banking services.
Frequently asked questions
Question: What time savings percentage did Mashreq Bank achieve using the IBM Bob platform?
Answer: Engineers recorded time savings ranging between 60% and 70% in software design, integration, and troubleshooting tasks.
Question: How many banking transactions does the bank’s integration platform process?
Answer: The bank’s digital platform processes an average of about 650 banking transactions per second across all channels and core systems.
Question: How does the bank handle data sovereignty and confidentiality requirements?
Answer: The bank is exploring the option of on-premises self-deployment of the platform on its local encrypted servers to benefit from intelligent models without compromising data residency controls.
