The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) will begin scaling up its digital consent acquisition (DCA) framework starting with 11 banks, using them as a model for a wider rollout across the banking and financial sector, Chairman Anil Kumar Lahoti said, even as integration challenges and commercial negotiations keep timelines uncertain.
The DCA framework seeks to digitise and centralise customer consents for commercial communications on a distributed ledger platform, allowing users to view, modify or revoke permissions that were earlier taken through paper forms or fragmented systems. “Once onboarded, these consents become visible to consumers… they can choose to allow, disable, or modify them. This brings control into the hands of the consumer,” Lahoti told FE in an interaction.
A pilot involving 11 banks, conducted with the help of the Reserve Bank of India, was completed in December and was largely successful, with some operational learnings. Based on this, the regulator plans to first implement the system at scale within these banks before expanding it to all scheduled banks, followed by the broader banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector and eventually other industries.
The rollout, however, is expected to be gradual given the scale of the exercise. Institutions will need to first centralise legacy consent data – often stored across multiple systems or taken offline – before integrating with the platform. “It involves onboarding crores of consents and system integration… existing consent data is distributed,” Lahoti said, adding that commercial negotiations between telecom service providers and banks would also influence timelines. “I would not assign a timeline,” he said.
He said that smaller entities are unlikely to face incremental compliance burdens, as they already obtain customer consents. “The only change is that these consents will now be brought onto the platform and made visible to the consumer. It is an important consumer right,” Lahoti said.
Separately, the regulator has upgraded its Do Not Disturb (DND) application, now available on Android and iOS, with multilingual support across 23 languages and simplified reporting of spam communications. The app allows users to flag unsolicited calls or messages within seconds and has improved help and tutorial features to aid adoption. “It is very user-friendly and allows reporting of spam within seconds,” Lahoti said, adding that usage will remain voluntary.
On spam detection, he said that telecom operators have deployed artificial intelligence-based systems that claim accuracy levels of over 90–95%, particularly to identify unregistered telemarketers operating outside the regulatory framework. Given the risk of false positives, including inadvertent blocking of legitimate messages such as one-time passwords, the regulator has built in safeguards. “Since this is pattern-based detection, it is not treated as conclusive evidence,” Lahoti said. Entities flagged by AI are subject to KYC and, if required, physical verification, while a proposal to lower the complaint threshold for action from five to three in such cases is under consultation.
Lahoti reiterated that commercial communications must be routed through designated number series – 140 for promotional calls and 1600 for service or transactional messages – adding that penalties apply only when normal numbers are misused for bulk communication. On tariffs, he said that pricing remains under forbearance, with competition and mobile number portability acting as checks.