Inside the pilot
IBM announced on 12 October that Mashreq is piloting its agentic software-engineering platform, IBM Bob, alongside IBM Context Forge. Mashreq says the integration platform involved supports digital banking, instant payments, cross-border transactions and API ecosystems, averaging about 650 transactions per second. A secure gateway handles roughly 4,000 AI-agent requests a month to connected banking, payments and enterprise systems.
Early results and controls
According to IBM and Mashreq, selected design and troubleshooting tasks that previously took two to three hours were completed within minutes, with early tests indicating a 60–70% reduction in time spent on those activities. Those figures are pilot results, not a guarantee of production performance. Mashreq says it is exploring locally hosted models for mission-critical uses where data residency and regulatory requirements matter, while the gateway limits agent access to enterprise knowledge, API specifications and operational context.
What it means for merchants
Merchants evaluating agentic AI for payment operations should start with bounded engineering workflows, measure time and error rates against a baseline, and put API permissions, audit logs and data-residency controls ahead of wider production access.
Read the original announcement
IBM Newsroom · 12 Oct 2026This brief summarizes the linked primary source. Claims and reported figures have not been independently audited by Payment Guide.