Andrew Bonwick
Vice President of Product Development at Relm Insurance
Madhav Sheth
CEO of Ai+ Smartphone
Stephen Rose
CEO Render Networks


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The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) yesterday released a circular informing about the activation of new SMS regulations. For the unaware, the new regulations are a part of the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR) order released on July 18, 2018.
As per the rule, the telcos will verify and scrub through every SMS that a verified or registered business/institution is trying to send its customers. If the SMS template isn’t registered, it will be blocked.
The regulatory provisions for SMSes are introduced to reduce the amount of spam and fraudulent messages that are sent to the people of India every day. The telcos will leverage a blockchain system to scrub through the SMSes and will block every message that doesn’t fulfil the regulatory obligations.
The new SMS regulations have been activated since April 1, 2021, as per a Trai order. It is worth noting that last month, on March 8, Trai had to intervene and relax the SMS regulations since millions of important messages from businesses and banks were blocked for the customers.
The regulator had asked the telcos to keep scrubbing the SMSes but not block them until directed otherwise. An earlier statement from Trai revealed that big banks and businesses such as SBI, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, LIC, and Samsung were on the list of defaulters who hadn’t followed the regulations.