Bill payment reminders, OTPs, promotional content to cost more for firms

Companies will now have to pay nearly 45 per cent more per SMS text message from August 1 after telecom firms raised the prices of enterprise messages, according to a report by The Economic Times (ET). An industry executive told ET that the rate of each enterprise message will now cost 13 paise for domestic clients, up 4 paise from the old rate.

Analysts said this will help telecom firms grow while the industry waits for the next round of tariff hikes.

Enterprise messages include commercial communication like bill payment reminders, one-time passwords, and promotional messages. Such messages are sent by enterprises over telecom networks, using a short messaging service (SMS).

The hike in price is applicable for domestic clients such as  Indian banks, domestic e-commerce platforms, etc. only. International clients whose messages originate in foreign servers like Amazon, Google, etc. will be charged around $0.05 per message.  According to the report, the volume of commercial messages in the country is at about 42 billion a month, or around 500 billion a year. A Rs 0.04 rise in rates would lead to Rs 2,000 crore increase in industry revenue on enterprise messaging.

Trai's directive to enterprises sending commercial messages

In May, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) said in a directive that enterprises sending commercial messages using telecom networks have two weeks to verify the headers and message templates on the distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform, failing which the said headers, templates, and messages will be blocked.

“Any further delay on the part of PEs to get the re-verification of Headers and Content Templates may result in the blocking of their Headers, Content Templates, and messages,” Trai warned. In February, Trai issued a directive to telecom firms to reverify the headers and templates to discourage misuse.