Several Founders, Co-Founders, CXO Bankers, CXO Fintech professionals & people who participated in the ePanel discussions:
- Mr. Jayaram M, Consultant (Partner), Basil Capital
- Mr. Hitesh Thakkar, Fintech Consultant, Self-Service Automation
- Mr. Kamonasish Aayush Mazumdar, Founder & CEO at Foodieverse
- Mr. C V Ramana Rao, Sr Manager, Punjab National Bank
- Mr. Ajay B Panicker, CEO & Founder, NetPay Limited
- Mr. Sharad Goklani, President and CTO at AU Small Finance Bank
- Mr. Abhishek Srivastava, AVP – Startups, HDFC Bank
- Mr. Shirsha Ghosh, Co-Founder and Head of Technology, Welance
- Mr. Vikas R Panditrao, Co-Founder, Forum of Industry and Academic Knowledge Sharing (FIAKS)
- Many other CEO/CXO Bankers & Fintech professionals on FIAKS Forum requested to remain anonymous
If you recollect the day when thousands of messages sent by banks, e-commerce companies, government authorities to intended recipients were not received by the recipients. Delayed OTPs and then they just came in multiple bursts. The whole system had been collapsed. Merchants went berserk. They were unable to send links, SMS confirmations, bills, reports, etc to end customers. All because of SMS scrubbing [1]
Well now here’s a photo shared by a FIAKS community member. He bitterly raises concern over such poor implementation of DLT to control spam SMS. Many banks, Telco was disrupted for the DLT compliance couple of weeks back as seen above. Isn’t all this waste of money?
Well, same with phone calls, people still in 2021 claim to be calling from banks, and give credit cards and that they are bank employees while they are clearly not. This is even funnier because this is easily scrubbable. One can clearly track words and stop these text messages. What’s the benefit of DLT then?
To begin with, a brief extract of DLT;
- Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a block-chain based distributed and usually public database that anyone can access & read information without any authentication. TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) requires telemarketers to be registered in the DLT platform so that in the public interest it can control the SMS spam from various marketing firms. Verification services, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Dogecoin are good use cases for DLT.
- SMS spamming can’t be blocked by DLT? It’s not like that. TRAI or providers can verify authentic senders & add their details on a public blockchain. Including let’s say, a Do-Not-Call (DNC) list of numbers. Then, SMS gateways or telecom companies can easily check the blockchain for a list of verified senders & numbers on the DNC list without having to interact with a central entity, since the blockchain is public & available to everyone. Normally, your DNC list or verified list of senders will be on a private database, on the TRAI server, which others don’t have direct access to. When they move that data to a blockchain, it’s available to everyone, instantly. No authentication is needed, in most cases. Every operator who needs it can set up a copy of the blockchain on their local servers, which gets updated automatically, as TRAI updates it.
- The database is replicated everywhere. Only a few may have permission to update/edit it, based on TRAI business rules. That’s why it’s called a “DLT – decentralized ledger”! It’s replicated 100s of times. Even if the TRAI website is down, the ledger/database will be available in 100s of other locations. Previously, only TRAI maintained the ledger. It was centralized.
- A member tries to postulate an example. DLT is like a transport authority. If you buy a vehicle as per one of the defined templates with the authority, you will get a registration number, and permission to ply on the roads. Now if you convert your car into a flying car, it would be illegal. But can/should the transport authority stop you from converting, or from flying? It will be the traffic police (or maybe air traffic controller) who would stop you, which would be quite tedious.
- Upon this member questions, “I don’t think that the real issue is transport authority wanting all the cars to pass through the toll naka. Some drivers are smart and driving through jungles. Now isn’t this a responsibility of traffic police to check such traffic too?” Yes, exactly. Hence the responsibility for the breach won’t be with the DLT platform per se. There are means to complain to TRAI, on platforms like NDNC (National Do Not Call Registry is run by the Indian government). Their efficacy is again another topic of debate.
Register and Read the complete discussions