Bahrain-based CrediMax has partnered with Mastercard to explore agentic commerce capabilities for merchants in the country.
The collaboration will see CrediMax, a provider of electronic payment solutions, work with Mastercard to assess how AI agents can support merchants’ ecommerce operations in Bahrain. The initiative uses solutions delivered through Mastercard Merchant Cloud. Mastercard Gateway will handle payment processing, and initial work will focus on Mastercard’s Agent Suite for Merchants.
Merchant Cloud and Agent Suite as the technical basis
Mastercard describes Merchant Cloud as a unified, open acceptance framework. It gives merchants access to modular services covering payments, agentic capabilities, fraud, authentication, tokenisation, data, and partner integrations. The framework is intended to help merchants and businesses scale their operations while maintaining security.
Agent Suite for Merchants brings AI-powered ecommerce functions directly into merchant-owned ecommerce environments. According to the companies, it enables AI agents to support the full consumer journey, from product discovery and selection through to payment and post-purchase support. In addition, the arrangement makes CrediMax one of the first institutions in Bahrain to work with Mastercard on scaling agentic shopping experiences through the suite.
Positioning merchants for AI-driven purchasing
The collaboration comes as AI shopping tools change the way consumers discover, compare, and buy products. Mr. Andrew Hocking, Chief Executive Officer of CrediMax, said the company’s priority is to help merchants respond as AI agents become part of the purchasing journey and to turn these developments into business growth. He also added that CrediMax will use its relationships with local merchants to identify where the capabilities can deliver value and to make adoption more accessible. This will be done while preserving the service standards and customer relationships merchants have already established.
For Mastercard, the partnership offers a way to align its agentic commerce proposition with the operational needs and commercial priorities of businesses in Bahrain. Mr. Saud Swar, Country Manager, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, and Other Levant at Mastercard, said the company is focused on providing the technology and security foundations required for adoption. The aim is to turn agentic commerce into practical value for merchants and their customers.
Agent Pay and trust in agent-initiated transactions
Mastercard’s wider agentic commerce offering also includes Agent Pay. This technology framework is designed to support trusted, secure, and transparent payments in agentic commerce. Agent Pay establishes a digital identity for AI agents, allowing them to be authenticated, authorised, and governed by consumer-defined permissions when acting on a consumer’s behalf.
Furthermore, payments are secured through agentic tokens, which keep each agent-initiated transaction within the limits set by the consumer. They also give consumers visibility over which agent acted on their behalf and where the purchase was made. Such controls address one of the central questions in agentic commerce: how to establish accountability when a purchase is initiated by software rather than directly by a person.
The companies present the collaboration as a scalable blueprint that merchants, payment service providers, and financial institutions in the region could use to adopt agent-driven commerce. They also expect the work to help build confidence in agentic transactions and to open the way for expansion into additional use cases and markets.
