#UAE #bankingAI - Dubai-based bank Mashreq is piloting IBM Bob, IBM’s AI-powered software engineering platform, to speed up integration engineering. According to a press release, early results show up to a 60-70 percent cut in time spent on integration design and troubleshooting. Work that took two to three hours now takes minutes. A secure gateway manages about 4,000 AI-agent requests a month across digital banking, payments and enterprise systems. Mashreq is working with IBM and Dubai-based technology partner GBM.
SO WHAT? - Banks have been cautious about letting AI agents near core systems, but Mashreq’s pilot shows one way to do it. AI agents get access only through a controlled gateway, and the platform underneath handles 650 transactions per second. Early results from the bank’s pilot demonstrate up to a 70 percent reduction in integration design and troubleshooting time. The metric highlights the enormous potential of agentic AI to improve operational efficiency and the fact that this is possible within an enterprise in a strictly regulated industry.
KEY POINTS:
IBM has announced that Mashreq is piloting IBM Bob, its enterprise AI software engineering platform. The bank is testing how agentic AI can speed software delivery and improve developer productivity.
The pilot covers the full development cycle for integration teams, from solution design and planning to development, code review and production troubleshooting. Tasks that needed two to three hours of manual effort were finished within minutes.
Early results show up to a 60-70% reduction in time spent on integration design and troubleshooting. IBM and Mashreq also report higher developer productivity through AI-assisted decision-making.
Mashreq’s integration platform is the backbone of its digital banking. It supports instant payments, cross-border transactions and API-driven services, and processes an average of 650 transactions per second.
The bank uses IBM Context Forge, based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), to orchestrate agents. It gives them secure access to integration knowledge, API specifications, architecture standards and operational context.
Through a secure gateway, Mashreq manages about 4,000 requests a month from AI agents to connected digital banking, payments and enterprise systems. The bank describes this as a collaborative AI environment for engineering teams.
Mashreq is modernising its integration platform with IBM and GBM, using IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, IBM MQ, App Connect, API Connect, Red Hat OpenShift and Confluent.
The bank is exploring an on-premises deployment of IBM Bob for mission-critical uses that may need locally hosted models, to meet data residency and regulatory requirements. Mashreq operates across 12 countries and territories.
ZOOM OUT - Launched globally in April 2026, IBM Bob is an AI development partner for enterprise software teams. It works across the full software development lifecycle, from planning and coding to testing, deployment and modernisation. Bob routes each task to a suitable model based on accuracy, performance and cost, drawing on Anthropic Claude, Mistral open-source models and IBM Granite. Governance is built in, with sensitive data scanning, policy enforcement, audit trails and configurable human approval points. More than 80,000 IBM employees use it, reporting an average 45 percent productivity gain. IBM says Bob helped South African IT consultancy Blue Pearl finish a planned 30-day Java upgrade in just three days.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Source: IBM / Mashreq
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