The Writers had fun punning on Truecaller stories. After all, the 13-year-old caller ID company has been liberal with pivots in its search for profitability. Truecaller finally achieved it in October when it listed on Nasdaq and doubled its revenues. India has had a key role in all this, not just because the turnaround story owes to its ad tech team here. A substantial part of its sprawling directory of six billion phone numbers is built off Indian users. Of late, the company has been building a new revenue stream called Truecaller for Business. It has already signed up 1,000 enterprises, including large Indian banks (such as SBI, HDFC, Axis), edtech (BYJU’S, Unacademy), e-commerce companies (Flipkart), and even IRCTC, the e-ticketing unit of the mammoth Indian Railways. Much of its new and old business faces a threat from what the Indian telecom agencies are proposing—a KYC-based national ID caller system. The telecom regulator has been asked to work on it, and if implemented, Truecaller will have to seek KYC data from telcos. Telcos, needless to say, are not flinching. If the regulator gives a mandate and timeline, we’ll do it, they say. In 2019, when Truecaller began auto-enrolling its app users for payments which it later blamed on a “bug”, the public pushback nearly killed it. The “delete Truecaller” wave may have lasted only for a while, but its fintech play came close to breaching the all-sacred, fail-safe two-factor authentication (2FA). The company finally shut down Truecaller Pay in 2021. Now its ad revenue is going strong, it has launched a few—dare I say copycat—products, but the KYC-based ID system is not the only threat looming. In a sharp and timely story—Truecaller launched a Clubhouse-like service called Open Doors on 13 July 2022
