The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) announced that the pilot of the Digital Consent Acquisition project, undertaken in collaboration with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) across 11 designated banks, is scheduled for completion by February 2026.
The initiative was launched under the consumer protection framework of the Joint Committee of Regulators (JCoR) to curb spam and cyber fraud. It seeks to test a secure digital system that enables customers to provide and manage consent for promotional messages, thereby resolving issues linked to unverifiable offline consent methods.
Additionally, TRAI and sectoral regulators have agreed on a phased transition timeline for banks and financial institutions to adopt the designated 1600-series numbering plan.
Further, additional consumer protection measures were discussed, including the mandatory whitelisting of uniform resource locators (URL), over-the-top (OTT) links, android application packages (APKs), and callback numbers used in commercial SMS. The regulators also considered publishing lists of blacklisted spamming entities on official websites as a deterrent against misuse.
Moreover, the committee deliberated on TRAI’s draft direction proposing enhanced principal entity (PE)-end security controls, such as real-time credential validation and CAPTCHA-based verification for one-time password (OTP) generation systems.
