Financial services exempt from ban on bulk SMS

The Department of Telecom has excluded transactional SMS from the
purview of the ban imposed on bulk short messages at the intervention
of the Reserve Bank of India and the telecom operators.

The DoT has also allowed telecom operators to send SMS to their own
subscribers on payment details, validity period or service alerts.

However, the DoT has added that telecom operators will be held
responsible in case any anti-social message creeps into the network.

Messages sent through third party aggregators will, however, continue
to be banned till September 29.

Transactional SMS includes messages sent by banks, travel services
such as airlines, railways and insurance companies to their customers.

"The DoT at the direction of the RBI has informed the telecom
operators to ensure that SMS-enabled financial services do not suffer
and that messages to individual customers by banks be treated as
individual messages. Various network performance related alerts –
outages, day end report related, work orders, ticket booking closures,
etc will also be allowed," said a Government source. However, SMS sent
through third party aggregators will not be permitted since most of
these players do not have the technology to separately identify
transactional messages from other promotional SMS. The DoT will send a
detailed notice to the operators over the next few days.

The DoT had imposed the ban on account of the expected Allahabad High
Court verdict on the Ayodhya issue. Operators had earlier written to
the DoT seeking a complete revoking of the ban.According to one
industry estimate, operators get about Rs 200 crore annually from
selling bulk SMS and a one week ban would cost about Rs 10 crore. But
more than the revenue impact, the tangential impact on those who use
SMS to communicate with their consumers is what is bothering the
industry.

Telecom operators are also concerned about being held responsible for
messages sent by banks and other agencies.

"The DoT wants us to be responsible for these transactional messages
when we are not the originators. The banks or agencies using the
facility should be told to monitor their platform," said a telecom
operator.