Bahrain's CrediMax Works With Mastercard to Bring AI Shopping Agents to Merchants

The first phase centres on Mastercard's Agent Suite for Merchants, which adds AI shopping agents to a retailer's own website. Shoppers can use the agents at each stage of a transaction, from finding a product to paying for it and getting support after the sale. The service will run on Mastercard Merchant Cloud, which bundles payment, fraud, security and data tools, with payments handled through Mastercard Gateway.

The companies said CrediMax is among the first in Bahrain to work with Mastercard on this kind of AI-driven shopping. For merchants and acquirers in smaller Gulf markets, the project is an early test of how card networks plan to keep AI agents inside existing payment rails rather than leaving the checkout to the AI platforms themselves.

Mastercard also described how its Agent Pay system controls those agents. Each agent receives a digital identity so it can be verified and approved, and must act within rules set by the shopper. Agents pay using agentic tokens, which keep each payment within the shopper's limits and show the shopper which agent made a purchase and where.

"As AI agents become part of the purchasing journey, our priority is to help merchants respond with confidence and turn emerging opportunities into business growth," said Andrew Hocking, chief executive of CrediMax.

Saud Swar, Mastercard's country manager for Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan and Other Levant, said the collaboration would let Mastercard "align our proposition with the operational needs and commercial priorities of local businesses in the Kingdom."

The companies did not name participating merchants or give a launch date. They said the work could serve as a model for merchants, payment providers and financial institutions in the region, and may later be extended to more use cases and markets.