Airtel Business recently launched Airtel IQ Gateway. Airtel describes it as an all-in-one platform that lets enterprises manage customer communications through various channels like SMS, WhatsApp, RCS ( Rich Communication Services) and voice, along with silent authentication that may not depend on traditional OTPs for ‘fraud protection.’

This is the URL to the platform: www.airtel.in/b2b/iq-gateway 

Airtel said the platform was launched nationwide after trial deployments with select banks and financial institutions. However, it hasn’t shared any metrics, benchmarks or results from these tests. So, we can’t independently validate the accuracy of their network-level intelligence systems. Airtel will showcase the platform at the India Mobile Congress in New Delhi from October 7 to 10.

What is Airtel trying to solve with IQ Gateway? It aims to provide enterprises with a single control point for customer communications across SMS, voice, WhatsApp and RCS.

This is intended to reduce enterprises’ dependence on external vendors for different services. It could also reduce Airtel’s dependence on intermediaries such as telemarketers for bulk business communications.

“By packaging voice, SMS, WhatsApp and video connectivity into a developer-facing, API-driven, pay-as-you-go product, Airtel repositioned itself from an upstream infrastructure supplier to a direct participant in the CPaaS value chain competing with vendors such as Twilio, Tanla, Route Mobile and Gupshup, several of whom depend on operators like Airtel for underlying connectivity access.” — MarkHub24, a marketing research company.

Airtel says Silent Authentication can replace OTPs: It claimed that this could replace the “OTP SMS for login and SIM-binding flows by validating that the entered number matches the active SIM in-device, reducing SIM-swap and social-engineering risks.”

This comes as communication platforms operating in India that use mobile numbers for user identification face a SIM-binding requirement. The current deadline for compliance is December 31, 2026. Follow this tag to catch up on MediaNama’s coverage of SIM Binding. 

Prevention of template misuse to send spam: Among the other use cases, Airtel said its platform can prevent the potential misuse of pre-approved message templates by telemarketers. Businesses and Telemarketers have to register their message templates on the TRAI-mandated DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology). 

For instance, a telemarketer could misuse a genuine service template to send promotional spam. Airtel wants to fix this by using the Airtel/telecom-side control layer on top. However, it is not exactly clear how Airtel would prevent such misuse.

According to Airtel, the platform is designed to address several problems; 

• To reduce dependence on OTPs by using Silent Authentication.
• To consolidate businesses’ fragmented communications technology stacks. 
• To enable businesses to know when a particular message/communication has successfully reached the intended user. 
• To prevent bot-driven SMS pumping, in which artificially generated international OTP traffic can inflate businesses’ bills.

Who are the competitors to Airtel in this space? Through this, Airtel is now entering into Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) and directly competing with Indian and non-Indian-based non-telecom companies, including Twilio, Tanla, Route Mobile, AMD Telecom (Routee) and Netcore Cloud.

Airtel’s direct telecom competitor Reliance Jio already has JioCX as its own CPaaS platform. Similarly, Vodafone Idea’s enterprise arm, Vi Business, also offers a CPaaS platform

Businesses can integrate this with their existing communication workflows or vendor ecosystems, and they can install it on their own premises or host it on Airtel’s cloud as software-as-a-service. This deployment option could be relevant to regulated enterprises, including those in the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector.

The press release leaves a lot of questions open. Some of them are: 

• Which network, device and usage signals does IQ Verify use, and how does it turn them into a score? The press release names the three categories of signals (network, device and usage) but doesn’t detail how these signals are used to make decisions. 
• Is the scoring available only for Airtel subscribers, or for numbers on other networks too?
• How does Silent Authentication verify the SIM in the device, and does it work for users on other operators’ networks?
• What happens when the fraud or spam score produces a false positive? Is there any grievance redressal mechanism for the flagged user or enterprise to contest it?
• The release says the platform is DPDP-compliant, but what categories of data does IQ Gateway store? What is the data retention policy? Are there restrictions on secondary uses of this data, including for training AI systems?
• Who were the banks and financial institutions in the trial deployments, how long did they run, and what results did they show on fraud reduction or billing savings?

We have sent these questions to Airtel seeking clarity; we will update the article if Airtel responds.

Catch up with MediaNama’s coverage of “Impact Of The Use Of Artificial Intelligence In Spam Prevention” here, 

Also read: 

• What TRAI’s amended UCC regulations say about using AI to detect spam
• How to deal with AI-generated calling spam