Trai warns seven banks against pesky calls,SMSs

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has warned banks and financial institutions against use of unregistered telemarketers for promoting their business.

"The authority has taken a series of measures for addressing the menace of unsolicited commercial communications. However, notwithstanding the action taken by TRAI, a large number of complaints continued to be received from consumers regarding calls/SMSs originated by unregistered telemarketers on behalf of banks, insurance companies, builders etc. for promoting their business in utter disregard to the regulations issued by the authority," according to the TRAI.

"Such behaviour of these banks and companies is in violation of "The Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (Thirteenth Amendment) Regulations, 2010″, which provides that in case complaints continue to come in, then on receipt of the third complaint, all the telecom resources of the entity or organization would be disconnected," the TRAI mentioned in its statement.

The telecom regulator has named seven banks and financial institution that have been flouting the regulation by marketing their products and services through unregistered telemarketers.

These banks are Axis Bank, Citi Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra, Punjab National Bank and the State Bank of India.

These institutions have been directed to look into the specific cases of breach, initiate corrective action and report back to the authority within a period of seven days, failing which the banks are liable to have all their telecom resources disconnected throughout the country.

In terms of the Regulations, telecom service providers (TSPs) are mandated to disconnect all the telecom resources of the aforementioned banks.

However, this may have serious implications for these banks and the general public.

"Keeping the larger public interest in view and to prevent public inconvenience, the Authority has decided to exercise temporary regulatory forbearance and has directed the banks to look into the specific cases of breach, initiate corrective action and report back to the Authority within a period of seven days, failing which the banks are liable to have all their telecom resources disconnected throughout the country," it said.

The telecom regulator has also released a consultation paper seeking comments on use of unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) based mobile banking services.