TRAI asks banks, financial institutions to re-verify message headers, content templates

New Delhi [India], May 25 : The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Thursday instructed that all principal entities (PEs), such as banks, financial institutions and alike, are required to get message headers and content templates re-verified.

According to the statement from TRAI, any commercial communication through SMS is subjected to scrubbing against the content template registered by PEs with the access service provider and, if it fails, then such SMS is not allowed to be delivered to the consumers.

TRAI has directed the access service providers to re-verify all registered headers and message templates on distributed ledger technologies (DLT) platform and block all unverified ones within 30 and 60 days, respectively.

Any delay on part of Principal Entities (PEs) to get the re-verification of headers and content templates may result in the blocking of their headers, content templates and messages, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) cautioned.

As per the regulatory framework, any commercial communication may only take place using registered headers assigned to the PEs for this purpose. Header means an alphanumeric string assigned to PEs under these regulations to send commercial communications.

TRAI observed that some PEs have registered a large number of headers and content templates and, at times, some of these are misused by some telemarketers.

According to TRAI, in February 2023, the regulatory body wrote to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), National Health Authority (NHA) and all central/state government departments, requesting them to sensitise all institutions or departments, under their ambit, who send bulk SMS, about the action required to be taken at their end to ensure that header and message templates are not misused.

It has been seen that many PEs have not yet completed the verification of headers and content templates, TRAI said. Due to a lack of timely action by PEs, headers and content templates assigned to such PEs remain vulnerable for likely misuse and may result in inconvenience to public in the form of spam and also financial frauds.

The regulatory body said any further delay on the part of by PEs to get the re-verification of headers and content templates may result in the blocking of their headers, content templates and messages. TRAI shall review the progress in the next two weeks and may issue appropriate direction, if required. Therefore, all the PEs should complete the process of verification of headers and content templates immediately.