CrediMax has appointed Andrew Mark Hocking as chief executive, bringing the former head of the British payments processor Tribe Payments to the Bahraini card company owned by Bank of Bahrain and Kuwait.
The appointment was announced by the company, with chairman Yaser Alsharifi welcoming it. CrediMax is Bahrain's longest established card issuer and merchant acquirer and operates as a subsidiary of BBK, giving it both a captive bank relationship and a processing business that serves other institutions in the region.
A processing career, not a banking one
Hocking comes from the technology side of payments rather than from retail banking, which is the notable feature of the hire. He was chief executive of Tribe Payments, a card issuing and acquiring processor operating out of the United Kingdom and Lithuania, having joined it as chief strategy officer and taken the top job the following year. Before that he was chief executive of Pay.com.
His Middle East experience is more directly relevant. He was chief strategy and analytics officer at Network International, the Dubai based acquirer that was for years the dominant merchant processor across the Gulf and North Africa before its acquisition by Brookfield. Anyone who has sat in that seat understands the regional acquiring market, its pricing structure and its bank relationships from the inside.
Earlier he was head of strategic planning at Elavon and held roles at Barclaycard, including head of strategy, planning and integration at Absa Card in South Africa. He holds a degree in economics from Aberystwyth and a master's in business administration from Warwick.
The competitive position he takes on
CrediMax occupies a defensible but narrowing position. It has the scale and the licences that come from decades as the incumbent, and the BBK relationship gives it issuing volume that a standalone processor would have to win. What has changed around it is the cost of entry. Cloud based issuer processing platforms, of exactly the kind Hocking has been selling, have made it possible for a bank or a fintech to launch a card programme without an incumbent processor, and regional players in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have been expanding aggressively into Bahrain.
Bahrain's own regulatory posture compounds the pressure and the opportunity. The Central Bank of Bahrain has been among the more permissive Gulf regulators on open banking and digital payments, which has brought new entrants into a small market. For an incumbent that means defending interchange and merchant relationships while also deciding whether to sell its processing capability to the very companies competing with its issuing business.
Appointing a processor chief executive rather than a career banker suggests the board has decided which half of that choice matters more. The test will be whether CrediMax can position itself as the region's processing utility rather than defend its position as Bahrain's card company, and the two strategies pull in different directions on pricing and on investment.
About CrediMax
CrediMax is a Bahraini payment solutions company and a subsidiary of Bank of Bahrain and Kuwait, providing card issuing, merchant acquiring and payment processing services in Bahrain and the wider region.
