“Our primary goal is to allocate transactional series numbers to regulated financial institutions such as banks, insurance companies, payment services as well as public service government bodies such as UIDAI (for Aadhaar authentication), and other social benefit schemes,” a senior government official told ET.
“This is from the perspective of customer protection to reduce frauds as well as for senders to conclude critical transactions without failures. But any other organisation which is facing problems of call failures for service use cases also have a provision to apply and seek approval from the telecom regulator,” he said.
ET’s emails to Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, IndiGo, and Air India didn’t elicit a response.
As more businesses in sectors such as ride-hailing, food-tech, quick grocery commerce, as well as social media adopt voice calls as an option to authenticate users, it makes sense for them to differentiate themselves from fraud numbers.
The department of telecommunications (DoT) on Tuesday allocated 160 numbering series for transactional and service calls made by businesses for commercial purposes. This was done mainly to protect mobile phone users from the surging nuisance of pesky calls and messages, which also lead to financial fraud.
All central and state government entities shall use 10-digit telephone numbers in the format of 1600ABCXXX whereas financial entities regulated by RBI, SEBI, Irdai and PFRDA shall use 1601ABCXXX. But others need to apply to Trai, it said in the notification.
However, for global organisations the source of business calls needs to be identified, executives said. “As per Trai norms, enterprise calls originating from foreign servers can’t seek Indian numbers from DoT provisioned series,” said Aniketh Jain, founder of customer communications startup Fyno. “Either they have to demonstrate that those calls originate and travel through Indian networks or they can also seek virtual numbers from licensed MVNO operators for cloud telephony.”
Previously, only 140 number series were allocated for all kinds of commercial purposes. After Tuesday, these will be classified into (140) marketing and (160) for service calls to easily identify the purpose of the caller.
ET had written about the upcoming mandate back in March.
The demarcation will largely benefit financial institutions such as banks to alert customers on use cases such as credit card payment reminders. Previously, subscribers had stopped receiving transactional calls if a number originating from 140 would be spam. But the new 160 and 161 series shall also ensure that subscribers do not fall prey to fraudsters dialling from personal SIMs to dupe recipients into believing that they were genuine bank representatives.
