Telcos, businesses spar over calls, SMS consent regime

Mumbai: Telecom operators and businesses, including banks, are at odds over how to implement India’s digital consent framework for commercial SMS and calls.

While one dispute is among the licensed telecom players, the broader one is between the telecom industry and banks around fixing and sharing of charges for consent gathering.

Telecom operators Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea want total control over consent ownership, as they have the majority of consumers, while demanding that other licensed firms like Quadrant Televentures (QTL) and STPL (formerly Videocon) should not be allowed to take consent, as they don’t have any subscribers and are contributing to spam.


Airtel said these service providers enjoy being "risk-free originators" in the ecosystem. For instance, 93% of the 32,042 blacklisted entities on the anti-spam platform were associated with two such operators, while 45% of all blacklisted templates during the quarter ended March 2026 were linked to these networks, Airtel said in a letter to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). It also claimed that more than 80% of unsolicited commercial communications complaints on voice calls in January 2026 originated from such networks.

Reliance Jio, in its submission, backed many of Airtel's concerns and argued that consent management should reside exclusively with the subscriber-serving telecom operator.

However, the other parties disagree.

“Telcos are making these demands to serve their own business interests,” said a member who is party to the discussions. “The digital consent solution has a huge monetisable potential. Therefore, the dominant operators want full control over it. I hope TRAI ensures free and fair competition in the matter.”

Email queries sent to Airtel, Jio and Vodafone Idea remained unanswered as of press time.

QTL and STPL could not be reached for comment.

Separately, the banks and telcos are fighting over costs related to consent gathering. Telcos are seeking 40-45 paise to record and maintain per consent from these businesses but the enterprises contend that they are neither obligated under existing regulations to bear these costs nor responsible for funding any telecom infrastructure.

TRAI’s anti-spam framework covers more than 280,000 registered entities, including banks, e-commerce companies, retailers and digital platforms, all of which rely heavily on commercial messaging. For telcos, it requires significant investments in technology infrastructure, cybersecurity, consent management systems and regulatory compliance.

On the other hand, for large institutions, the costs could be substantial. For instance, a bank such as HDFC Bank, with over 120 million customers, could incur an annual cost of around Rs 4.8 crore for sharing consent records with telcos.

“This cost burden is unjustified; we already collect customer consent through KYC and onboarding processes. Paying telcos to maintain a parallel consent ledger feels like paying twice for something we have already done,” said a senior banking executive involved in discussions with telecom companies.

“This is a telco compliance requirement, and the cost should sit with the party that was regulated to build it,” said another banker. “Passing costs downstream to principal entities is essentially telcos subsidising their own regulatory burden through their business customers.”

Sources say that banks would likely demand guarantees around uptime, dispute resolution and liability if a consent record is incorrectly maintained or lost. Without clear guidelines, they're paying for infrastructure they can't audit or control. Also, smaller banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) with large retail customer bases would be disproportionately impacted compared with large private banks that can absorb the cost, potentially creating an uneven playing field.

But the telecom side disagrees.

“The 40-45 paisa charge is negligible relative to the revenue businesses generate from customer communications,” one telecom executive told ET. “These banks already charge customers SMS alert fees of around Rs 15 per quarter, and even make a profit out of these. The proposed consent management fee represents only a fraction of the amount institutions recover for messaging-related services,” he said.

HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank did not respond to ET’s request for comment.