OTP communication for payment transactions resumes, no complaints filed

After a week’s pause, communication of One Time Passwords (OTP) through short messaging for payment transactions resumed smoothly.

Last week, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) had put on hold the implementation of its regulations to curb unsolicited commercial communication. The regulator gave banks and other service providers one week to adhere to the regulations after customers across the country failed to receive text messages and OTPs. A senior Indian Banks’ Association executive said things began smoothly after a one-week standstill. Members have not given negative feedback.

On Wednesday, none of the banks faced any major issue, said a person aware of the matter, belonging to a payment gateway firm. Major private sector lenders also said they are not experiencing any outages with respect to payments and the operations are running smoothly.

Meanwhile, the Delhi High Court has refused to stay the implementation of unsolicited commercial communication messages.  Noida-based telemarketing firm Shivtel Communications had filed a writ petition seeking a stay on scrubbing of commercial text messages by telecom companies. 

The court took cognizance of TRAI’s latest instructions to telecom firms and declined to stay the implementation. The matter will now be heard on May 11.

The regulations require companies to register templates of their commercial text messages and the process was put on hold for a week till Tuesday, following customer complaints. Scrubbing refers to the verification process followed by telecom companies for sending commercial text messages to the customers.

On Tuesday, the telecom regulator allowed telecom companies to resume scrubbing of messages and record details in case of anomalies such as mismatch of content ID, template etc. 

However, messages will not be blocked and telecom companies are allowed to deliver them to recipients. Details of all such anomalies will be shared bi-weekly with TRAI, which will review the scrubbing process on March 23.