The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has announced that under the joint TRAI-Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Digital Consent Acquisition (DCA) pilot to digitise and standardise consent for promotional communications, SMS notifications will shortly be sent to select customers (limited in number) by telecom service providers (TSPs). The pilot, starting with nine TSPs and eleven major banks, will allow this set of customers to digitally review, manage, and revoke the consents they had previously given for promotional communications. This pilot initiative aims to address long-standing gaps in legacy consent practices and test the readiness of the unified digital consent platform before nationwide rollout.
Under the existing Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (TCCCPR), 2018, customers can block promotional calls and messages based on categories of senders across sectors. The regulations also empower customers to selectively allow promotional messages from specific entities. Further, they prescribe a digital consent registry, which businesses must use to record customer consents for promotional communication.
However, onboarding legacy consents, those earlier collected via paper forms or standalone digital systems has remained a major deterrent in effective adoption. This has resulted in fragmented, opaque and non-standardised consent practices.
Moreover, the present mechanism does not allow customers to view or revoke legacy consents given to multiple businesses. Therefore, despite the intent behind TCCCPR 2018, full implementation has not been possible due to challenges in uploading and validating large volumes of legacy consents.
Participating TSPs and banks have completed the required technical development and system integration over the past several months. The banks have now begun uploading sample sets of old consents onto the shared digital platform established for the pilot. Besides, the new consents acquired by the participating banks will also be uploaded onto the digital platform.
As part of system testing on a sample basis, customers whose old consents have been uploaded, may receive SMS notifications from short code 127000 sent by their respective TSPs. These notifications will be issued only to a limited subset of customers whose consents have been uploaded by the banks on the digital platform, and are intended to assess platform readiness across TSPs, banks, and the consent registry. Customers who do not receive such communication need not be concerned, as the pilot is presently limited in scope and intended for full-scale rollout only later.
Each SMS will contain a standard advisory message along with a secure link directing the customer to the authorised Consent Management Page of the TSP. Through this portal, customers will be able to view the consents recorded by these eleven banks against their mobile numbers, and decide whether they wish to continue, modify, or revoke any of these consents. The consents visible on the portal will reflect all old consents uploaded by the participating banks. No personal or financial information will be sought at any stage, and customers are advised to act on the SMS received only from the 127000 short code. Action on these SMS by the customers will be optional.
