TRAI's New Rules To Curb Spam: Could Block Text Messages From Banks & Financial Institutions

Following a telecom regulator move aimed at curbing spam, specifically phishing attempts, consumers may experience disruptions in receiving service and transactional messages from banks, financial institutions, and e-commerce firms on their mobile phones starting next month.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has asked telecom companies to stop forwarding messages with URLs or call-back numbers that the sender has not whitelisted, or registered with a telecom company, starting on September 1.

According to the regulator's order, messages containing these components will be blocked if banks, financial institutions, and online platforms don't register their templates and content with operators by August 31.

Total commercial messages every month

Industry data indicates that approximately 55 billion commercial messages are sent monthly in India, with 1.5–1.7 billion messages sent daily.

Industry executives state that because the blockchain-based distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform needs to be updated, the telecom sector is currently requesting additional time from Trai to implement the mandate.

Officials familiar with the situation claim that the regulator is unwilling to back down because it believes it has given the telecoms enough time.

Lack of TRAI mandate

Due to the lack of a Trai mandate governing platforms like WhatsApp and Google's rich communication services (RCS) messaging, whitelisting entails that entities sending messages must supply all information pertaining to url('') platforms.

But, as the experts noted, if the entities haven't been whitelisted, banking messages—where regulations forbid transmission over OTT—will be blocked.

TRAI ordered telcos to cease immediately

Despite Trai's more than a year-long requests that telcos adopt the most recent measures, the regulator finally cracked last week, ordering telcos to cease transmitting non-whitelisted messages as of September 1.

When Trai issued instructions in May of last year, the telecom companies were asked to make sure that the content template contained only call-back numbers and whitelisted URLs, APKs, and OTT links.

They were also asked to provide a compliance report to Trai within 45 days. Per the directives, telecommunication companies were requested to guarantee that messages can always be tracked back to their original senders. However, the telecom companies haven't yet fully followed the guidelines.