Trai to complete digital consent pilot by February

Mumbai: The telecom regulator said Thursday that the pilot of the Digital Consent Acquisition project, jointly implemented with the Reserve Bank of India ( RBI) across 11 nominated banks, is expected to be completed by February 2026.

The pilot was initiated as part of consumer protection measures by the Joint Committee of Regulators (JCoR) to combat spam and cyber fraud. It aims to test a secure system for customers to give and manage consent for promotional messages digitally, addressing concerns over unverifiable offline consent mechanisms.

Alongside the pilot, Trai and sectoral regulators, at a meeting Thursday, agreed on a phased deadline for banks and financial institutions to migrate to the designated 1600-series numbering plan.

Additional consumer protection measures were also discussed, including mandatory whitelisting of URLs, OTT links, APKs, and callback numbers used in commercial SMS. Plans to publish lists of blacklisted spamming entities on regulator and service provider websites were considered as a deterrent against misuse.

The committee also deliberated on Trai's draft direction mandating enhanced PE-end security measures, including real-time credential validation and CAPTCHA enforcement for OTP generation systems.