Pesky Communications: Banking sector improves compliance

A review meeting is scheduled to be held on March 23, wherein Trai will take a call regarding the next course of action. The telecom regulator will also be meeting RBI to assess the situation.

The banking and financial sector’s compliance with regards to following the new blockchain-based technology to check pesky communications is improving. Though the success rate is still not 100% it is increasing every day as telecom operators are sending daily reports regarding the messages, which are failing under the new mechanism, to banks and telemarketers, to make amends. No message is being blocked as of now, even the ones that are not following the desired format.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has held several meetings with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) regarding the matter. It was only when RBI strictly asked banks to follow the latest technology, that banks started to move. Currently, the success rate of sending commercial messages is over 85% under the new mechanism and Trai is likely to continue with the existing scheme of not blocking even the non-compliant communications for some time, as it doesn’t want to inconvenience the customers.

A review meeting is scheduled to be held on March 23, wherein Trai will take a call regarding the next course of action. The telecom regulator will also be meeting RBI to assess the situation.

Earlier, Trai had reached out to financial regulators asking them to nudge players, under their jurisdiction, to comply with the system set up to check pesky messaging. Just a week back, round 30% of the commercial messages from banks and 50% from other financial intermediaries failed to work under the new blockchain-based mechanism put in place to check pesky SMSes.

The decision to not block even non-compliant messages was taken to prevent an outage of SMSes as had happened on March 8 when the new system was enforced. The day had seen around 400 million SMSes not being delivered, including one-time passwords from banks.