Banks are rushing to meet the deadline set by telecom regulator the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) that seeks to block spam and phishing messages by mandating telecom companies to block messages containing URLs, OTT links, APKs, or call-back numbers that are not “whitelisted”—registered with telcos—by the message senders.
This may impact consumers in India in getting service and transactional messages from banks, financial institutions, and e-commerce platforms
Presently, entities only register their headers and templates with telecom operators, without including the actual content of the messages. Starting in September, telcos must implement a system to read and verify the content of commercial messages against their records. Messages that do not match the registered content will be blocked.
As per experts, this may impact the 1.5-1.7 billion commercial messages sent daily in India, with the total reaching about 55 billion per month.
Telecom companies such as Airtel, Reliance Jio, and Vodafone Idea have requested an extension of the deadline, citing the need to update their blockchain-based distributed ledger technology (DLT) platforms.
Trai, however, unlikely to provide any further extension of the deadline.