Truecaller announces partnerships with Google, Airtel and ICICI Bank at Stay Ahead event

Caller ID servcie Truecaller held a key event today in India. The service made a bunch of new announcements, including that of partnerships with Google, Airtel and ICICI Bank. Further, the company also announced Truecaller 8, an update to the existing Android app.

Read the complete press release below

Truecaller Major Announcements from the Stay Ahead Event

Nearing a decade of helping consumers make their mobile communication more safe and efficient, Truecaller today announced its largest ever brand and product transformation. Speaking at the company’s first annual “Stay ahead” event, which gathered company executives, founders and key partners Alan Mamedi, CEO and Co-founder, Truecaller said, “We have been able to build a mobile identity platform and ecosystem that more and more people are relying on a daily basis to build safe and meaningful services on top of it – and today we’re finally able to showcase the true potential of Truecaller. While the Truecaller journey is full of new features to help you solve your daily communication needs, for the first time, we are venturing into a territory that goes beyond knowing who is calling, but once again, it’s an adventure that touches millions of users.”

Introducing New Truecaller 8: Truecaller announced a completely new redesign of the Android app, and now with a broader array of useful features including:

• SMS: Instantly see who’s SMS’ing you and filter out all spam messages. Spam SMS account for 15% of all SMS messages sent globally, and represents 1.2 trillion spam messages each year.
• Flash Messaging: Send quick pre-defined messages to any Truecaller user to let them know if you’re in distress, you’re on your way, your location, or that you’ve reached home.
• Truecaller Pay: Android user in India can now send or receive money securely over their mobile phone thanks to a new partnership with ICICI Bank, the leading multinational banking and financial services provider in India.

Developers, a central piece for Truecaller: With TrueSDK, Truecaller has been able to ease out the process of user on boarding and verification in mobile apps through its partnerships with key digital brands, app developers and startups across verticals. While so far, the service was only available for Android platform, TrueSDK will now become platform agnostic with its support for iOS and web platforms, making it easier for developers to create unified experiences across platform for their end users. Some key milestone that the company announced during the event:

• TrueSDK is contributing over 1/3rd of daily user on-boarding and verifications for its partners
• Number of apps leveraging TrueSDK has grown by over 8X
• Daily signups/verifications with TrueSDK have gone up by 15X

Truecaller & ICICI Bank to Launch a Mobile Payment Service: For the first time, Truecaller is venturing into a territory that goes beyond the dialer experience. Utilizing our mobile identity platform and working with ICICI Bank to build a financial service on top of it, our new service offers one stop solution for secure mobile payments. Truecaller users will be able to create their unique Virtual Payment Address (VPA) in the app, and can instantly send or receive money using any Unified Payments Interface (UPI) supported bank. In addition, users can also do prepaid and postpaid recharges. This feature will be available to the ICICI & non ICICI users as well. The service powered by ICICI bank is absolutely secure and follows 2-factor authentication as per RBI guidelines. All the banking & transactional data of the customers is securely handled by ICICI bank conforming to NPCI and RBI guidelines. Truecaller will not park any money or handle sensitive data such as account details,credit/debit card information of its users.

Abonty Banerjee, Senior General Manager & Head – Digital Channels at ICICI Bank said, “At ICICI Bank, we always aim to be at the fore-front of creating pathbreaking solutions to leverage on emerging technologies. In keeping with this legacy, the Bank played a pivotal role in conceptualising UPI as an initiative along with NPCI and was the first bank to introduce UPI in its mobile app. We are delighted to offer our UPI platform to Truecaller which is one of India’s most widely used mobile application. With this new service, users will get the benefit of making quick and easy payments to any mobile number registered with the BHIM app, thereby enabling them to reach out to a wider section of people. Additionally, users can also undertake payments for utility services such as pre-paid recharges and post-paid mobile bills at the click of a button. We believe this association shall make UPI payments seamless for a larger audience and will also play a crucial role in strengthening the Government's 'Digital India' mission.” Mr. Dilip Asbe, Chief Operating Officer at NPCI said, “NPCI would like to appreciate ICICI Bank and Truecaller for leveraging state-of-the-art UPI technology for enabling secure payments and brining out innovative solution for customers. This remarkable development will encourage more large players in the ecosystem to adopt UPI faster.”

Truecaller’s big leap forward to help serve the underserved with Airtel; introducing “Airtel Truecaller ID” fo hundred of millions of users in India: In a ground-breaking announcement, Truecaller announced a first of it’s kind partnership with Airtel to launch “Airtel Truecaller ID” to extends the caller ID feature of Truecaller to Airtel’s non-data users using feature phones, and will be delivered to users via Flash SMS before the call hits the users mobile. All feature phone users with Airtel mobile service can now use “Airtel Truecaller ID” to see who’s calling. This first of its kind service is set to provide online experience to offline users, helping them take the right call and to make their communication safer and more efficient. This subscription based service that will ease a user’s life from unwanted spam calls without having to subscribe to data service or buy a smartphone.

Raj Pudipeddi, Director of Consumer Business & Chief Marketing Officer at Airtel said, “Airtel has been a pioneer in introducing innovative product solutions to enhance customer experience and we are delighted to announce this partnership, which will be a global first. Airtel and Truecaller will enable millions of feature phone users to enjoy a ‘smartphone like’ experience in offline mode and add to their mobile experience. We hope this partnership will encourage other global developers to innovate for the feature phone segment, which still forms a large part of the overall market in countries like India.”

Truecaller and Google come together to improve video calling for millions: Truecaller today announced that a strategic agreement to integrate Google Duo, a high quality video calling service, within the Truecaller app. This will add a crucial communications layer that strengthens the value of Truecaller’s wildly popular dialer, caller ID, and spam blocking app already used by more than 250 million users globally. Truecaller integration with Google Duo will be available in the coming months for Android and iOS as a permission-based service, where users will be able to opt-in and out at any time. “Video calling should work for everybody, regardless of what platform they are on. Our aim is to make video calling simple, fast, and available to everyone,” said Amit Fulay, Head of Duo at Google. “With this Truecaller integration, we’re able to bring a better video calling experience to millions of new users.”

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