New TRAI regulations interrupt banking services like SMS, OTPs

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has recently released a guideline under which the contents of every SMS will have to be verified before it is delivered. The process, which is known as scrubbing, has been implemented.

TRAI has suspended the new norms for commercial text messages for a week as institutions dealing with banking, payment saw massive disruption in SMS and OTP deliveries. The new norm aims at filtering out spam messages. But now TRAI has decided to give establishments a week’s time to switch to the new system.

What is the new system?

• The new norms, based on blockchain technology, aimed at curbing unsolicited and fraudulent messages.
• Telecom companies, as mandated by TRAI, switched to the new norms.
• According to the new rules, companies are to link themselves so that no fraudulent message, out of the registered format, get sent to customers.
• The SMS and OTPs, when sent by user entities will be checked against the templates pre-registered by them on the blockchain platform. This process is known as scrubbing.