Axis Bank to charge for SMS services from July 2021

Axis Bank has revised some of its charges including those for SMS alerts following the new regime introduced by the telecom regulatory authority. The bank has said that from July 2021 it will charge customers 25 paise for every SMS alert subject to a maximum of Rs 25 a month. This will not include promotional text messages or messages sent to the customer or the OTP that is sent to authenticate transactions. Premium accounts, salary accounts and basic accounts will be spared charges.

In terms of the new regulations, senders of bulk SMS message, will have to first submit a pre-registered template and also subsequent messages will have to match the template failing which the telecom operator will block the messages. The process of authenticating the messages is referred to as scrubbing. According to telecom industry sources, the charges imposed by the bank reflect the cost of scrubbing messages. Axis Bank accounts for the highest number of mobile banking transactions in the private sector.