Across global financial services, digital transformation has long moved beyond mobile apps and paperless transactions. Banks are now rethinking the very architecture of how they operate, compete and serve their clients. From AI-powered operations to cloud-native platforms, innovation today means rewiring both the back and front end of banking institutions.
Mashreq is at the forefront of this shift. Headquartered in Dubai and with a footprint extending across the MENA, South Asia and beyond, its transformation journey reflects broader trends in the global banking industry – where agility, automation and the effective deployment of AI capabilities are becoming the new pillars of competitiveness.
“I see AI not as a disruptor but as an enabler,” says Mohamed Abdel Razek, Group Head of Technology, Transformation and Information at Mashreq. “It’s transforming how we work, how we serve, and how we make decisions.”
Four AI quadrants reshaping banking
AI has evolved from an experimental frontier to an embedded capability. Banks like Mashreq now treat it as foundational – not a future trend but an operational reality. Razek outlines four quadrants where AI is reshaping banking: customer experience, productivity, growth and regulatory compliance.
On the customer front, the ambition is to go beyond chatbots toward fully agentless servicing. “The real goal is not just to answer queries or funnel customers to the next stage of their journey, but to fulfil requests with precision and speed,” he explains.
Internally, AI is supercharging employee productivity. Tools like Microsoft GitHub and Copilot are streamlining everything from code development to HR and legal workflows. In some cases, policy documents that previously took hours to draft now emerge in minutes with AI-driven prompts.
Banks are also using AI to unlock commercial value. At Mashreq, predictive models help identify high-potential markets, assess client risk and automate credit decisioning. One leadership cohort is even using generative tools to run country-entry assessments – a task traditionally requiring teams of analysts and weeks of manual data-crunching.
In parallel, regulatory and security operations are being transformed. “We use AI to detect anomalies, prioritise patches to address vulnerabilities or errors and identify fraud patterns across vast volumes of data,” says Razek.
Reinventing the infrastructure layer
Beneath these capabilities lies a more radical transformation: the modernisation of infrastructure. The convergence of application programming interfaces (APIs), microservices and cloud computing is enabling banks to shift from legacy systems to modular, scalable platforms.
Mashreq’s 2025 launch of a next-generation API marketplace – enabling external developers and corporate clients to experiment in sandbox environments – is emblematic of this shift. “We’re moving from static ERP integration to dynamic co-creation,” says Razek.
Cloud adoption has accelerated this agility. It allows banks to train AI models securely, scale compute resources elastically and move closer to real-time data ingestion. It also opens doors to using advanced tools from providers like OpenAI without compromising client confidentiality or regulatory obligations.
For Mashreq, this transformation is not just about the UAE. In 2024, the bank rolled out its NEO segment in Egypt – tailored to local regulatory requirements but built on the same underlying tech infrastructure. More than 350,000 NEO accounts were opened in Egypt in the first year, with a straight-through processing rate of over 90%. In early 2025, Mashreq launched pilot operations as a digital retail bank in Pakistan and aims to onboard millions of retail customers over the next five years using the same infrastructure.
Agility at scale
Underlying this technological re-architecture is a transformation in delivery models. Banks are no longer pursuing multi-year tech programmes with waterfall timelines. At Mashreq, the operating model has shifted toward quarterly prioritisation and agile delivery.
“We have agile teams currently focused on enhancing over 40 journeys on the retail banking side alone,” says Razek. “Meanwhile, centralised transformation teams handle the heavy lifting, such as infrastructure, data frameworks and cybersecurity.”
One example of this agility in practice is the development of the Smart Call Report function. Using generative AI and natural language processing, Mashreq now generates relationship manager call summaries in under a minute – a task that previously consumed 10 to 12 minutes per call. The productivity gains are tangible across the bank’s private and corporate banking operations.
This agile approach enabled Mashreq to launch NEO in Egypt and pilot operations for its new retail proposition in Pakistan – both within just 12 months – integrating over 50 systems per entity. “Transformation used to be a monolithic, multi-year exercise. Now, it’s a prioritisation game,” Razek notes. “You define the key priorities every quarter – and you deliver.”
Designing for operational resilience
Yet even the most advanced systems are meaningless without trust. As Razek points out, “digital resilience isn’t just about systems being operational. It’s about whether they’re performing as expected – every hour, every minute.”
This thinking has led Mashreq to embed security into design, rather than treating it as a secondary add-on. Through solutions such as device registration, AI-based risk scoring and biometric authentication, the bank is eliminating reliance on outdated risk assessment and verification methods like SMS OTPs. Transaction anomalies are flagged in real time. Fraud patterns are tracked and continuously updated through machine learning.
Still, resilience extends beyond technology, to the people overseeing it. “If you’re not built digitally native, there’s always a gap – in your processes, in your governance and in your people,” Razek reflects. “We’re working hard to close those gaps, to train people to think in straight-through processes, to manage risk as technology failure, not just human error.”
A broader blueprint
Mashreq’s story is not unique, but it is instructive. Banks worldwide face the same imperative: to move faster, become more predictive and serve in a smarter way – all while maintaining trust and compliance.
The shift underway is not just technological. It’s structural, cultural and strategic. And as Razek points out, the winners won’t just be the ones with the best apps or slickest interfaces. “It’s about building an organisation where technology runs the processing, and people manage the process.”
Ultimately, the real transformation lies not in what banks build, but in how they are built to change.
