Truecaller’s capabilities go much beyond just caller identification (ID) and the company does not consider as threat the government’s calling name presentation (CNAP) service for which the telecom operators have started doing trials. “Our services can coexist with CNAP,” Rishit Jhunjhunwala, chief product officer and managing director of Truecaller India, told FE in an interview.
“Truecaller is now also telling users why somebody is calling, telling them what other people are saying about this caller, and whether this call is a scam or fraud,” Jhunjhunwala said, adding that the company’s offering has enough value in a consumer’s life beyond just showing KYC-based caller ID to users, on which the government’s CNAP service is based. Truecaller shows spam statistics with a red colour on the screen of users to help them identify the call is from a spamster. The same feature is not present in CNAP.
His confidence stems from the experience of a similar feature being rolled out by governments in countries like the US, Canada and the UAE, and easy existence of Truecaller in those areas.
India is the largest market for Truecaller contributing about 74% of the company’s total sales globally. Of the company’s total monthly active user base of 383.4 million as of March-end, 272.6 million users were in India alone.
Owing to the traction in Truecaller for Business offering, increased number of users, new ad formats, and ad income from the Indian Premier League (IPL) season, the company reported an 8% year-on-year (y-o-y) increase in sales from India operations at around `244 crore in the January-March quarter.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) in February had recommended that the department of telecommunications (DoT) should mandate the caller name identification feature in the telecom network. This means that with the rollout of this feature, users will be able to see the name of anonymous callers on their phone screens, which in a way will help in curbing financial frauds over the phone.
“We are more a user crowdsource type of model where people suggest other people’s names and give us signals,” Jhunjhunwala said. He added that with or without the government’s caller ID feature, the fundamentals of Truecaller and its approach beyond just a caller identification app remain unaffected.
When asked about how Truecaller sees its business model post the implementation of the data protection law since it is based on data consent, Jhunjhunwala said, “It is a misconception that once users install Truecaller, we take their phone book and that is the data that powers search results. That’s not true.”
“A big source of data is users themselves when they register with their names on the app. Second big source of data is that users can correct and suggest names, when they receive a call,” he explained.
The phone book access taken by Truecaller is for identifying whether it’s a saved number in a phone book or not. This is because if a user is getting a call from a saved contact it should show with that contact name and not something else. “The reason we need phone book permission is to judge the incoming calls. If this is a saved contact, we don’t participate. If it’s an unsaved number that is unknown to this user, then we need to do a Truecaller lookup,” Jhunjhunwala said.
The company said it has complied with data protection laws in other countries and sees no difficulty in complying with the law in India as well once the rules come into force.
In India, Truecaller sees growth in adoption of smartphones as a major growth driver for the company. The same will help the company to grow its active user base, premium subscribers, business vertical, as well as adtech business.
“The primary growth driver is how well we can protect our consumers from spam and fraud. As long as we keep our heads down and keep focusing on building capabilities around that, we believe, we have a lot more space to grow in India,” Jhunjhunwala said, adding that he is bullish on the adtech market in India. The company has introduced new ad formats aimed at monetising user attention with better serving advertiser objectives.
Among other features, Truecaller launched its AI-powered assistant in India last year which will answer calls on the receiver’s behalf, while continuing to filter out unwanted spam.
In February, Truecaller launched its call recording feature in the country, enabling users to record and transcribe all calls in English and Hindi. The company recently collaborated with HDFC Ergo to launch the fraud insurance feature. Fraud insurance will give users up to `10,000 stolen funds reimbursement for call/SMS fraud with Truecaller’s premium users.
