TRAI’s New SMS Rule Suspended For 7 Days As Users Unable To Receive OTPs

Acting on the complaints about SMS failures of several banks, the TRAI has now suspended the new rules that were implemented to check spam messages.

The new rules were implemented on Monday by the regulatory body.

Read on to find out why the new rules were suspended by TRAI!

Failure In Generating SMSes And OTPs; TRAI Suspends New Rules
Several banks complained to the regulator about the failure in generating SMSes and OTPs. This also affected services such as net banking, Aadhaar-enabled transactions, credit card payments, railway ticket bookings and vaccine registrations.

One of the top officials of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has now stated, “We are giving companies and government bodies seven more days to implement the regulations. Some banks reached out to us on Monday as their customers were facing problems in receiving OTPs.”

He also said that customers are a priority for TRAI and it is high time that companies register themselves.

It was in July 2018, when TRAI had implemented the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulation that would help the regulatory body deal with spam effectively. The rules ensiured that unregistered senders would not send commercial messages, and also prevented registered companies from sending fraudulent messages to their customers.

S.P. Kochhar, director general, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has said that TSPs (telecom service providers) have already started following the process of content scrubbing in order to keep spam messages in check. TSPs have already sent communications to the principal entities to register their content template with TSPs before 7 March.

He said, “We request all principal entities to get their content template registered with TSPs and help address the issue of unsolicited commercial communication,”

Multiple Banks And Firms Report Transaction Failure
We already reported on Monday that several banks and financial technology firms suffered from transaction failures due to delays in receiving one-time passwords. For instance, Axis Bank Ltd. reported that only 25-30% of the OTPs were delivered to the customers.

This was all caused by the telecom companies in India who implemented a digital ledger system to scrub data in SMSes. It was meant to block the fraudulent messages which are being delivered to individual users.

However, as per a senior banker, the technology caused unexpected obstructions for bank customers on Monday.

Kochhar added. Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, Bharti Airtel Ltd and Vodafone Idea Ltd are COAI members.