Truecaller hears the sound of money in digital payment push
Truecaller has tried to make mobile communication more secure in spite of its tryst with privacy experts. As they scaled more, India became one of their key markets. In an interaction with ETtech's Aritra Sarkhel, Alan Mamedi, CEO of Truecaller, discusses new partnerships, privacy issues and net neutrality. Edited Excerpts:
Economic Times (ET): What are the new partnerships forged by Truecaller in India?
Alan Mamedi (AM): We introduced Truecaller Pay, which is a mobile payment service. We have collaborated with ICICI on the same, which will help users send and receive payments. Apart from that, we partnered with Airtel to introduce caller ID for Indians who use feature phones. Lastly, along with Google, we have integrated with the Duo video calling platform. Also, we have identified so far 2.2 billion incoming calls, 568 million outgoing calls and 500 million spam calls in a month.
ET: How do you look at Net Neutrality?
AM: We think it should be an open platform available to anyone, just the way we are building Truecaller. We are platform agnostic. Once you introduce net neutrality, you start keeping things away from people. Things they might not be aware of.
ET: How has the India centres contributed to your growth?
AM: We are now operating from Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. We have built our sales team, marketing team, partnership team, and now our engineering team is not only focusing on core products, but also on some India-specific integration into our product. We aim to grow the team fairly big this year.
ET: How will you stand out from the rest with this partnership with ICICI Bank?
AM: We partnered with ICICI Bank to launch a payments service based on government's UPI initiative. It's important because this is more than P2P and recharge. The way Truecaller works today is basically a collection of your contacts in the cloud that you don't need to worry about, and you can have this access whenever you need it. The way we have integrated with UPI, you will be able to make payments to anyone in your contacts that has any UPI address in a few clicks. We have double-layer security.In the first phase you get identity from Truecaller, and in the second you also get identity from the bank. This is important because we have seen a lot of frauds on text messages requesting for money.
ET: Where do you draw the line in terms of privacy?
AM: We have built our platform based on user requests. Our mission is to make communication safe and efficient. You can disable features if you don't want it. But it's actually a very powerful tool to make your communication better.
ET: Have you tied up with startups?
AM: A lot of collaboration in TrueSDK programme has happened which was launched earlier with startups like OYO Rooms. We collected their feedback before launching True caller SDK. Now it's even available on iOS and the web platform.We have integrated things like True caller SDK or True caller Priority for our developer community. More startups have been included in this programme.
ET: Has the SOS functionality in feature phones been rolled out?
AM: We are looking at it as a different product. We are working on flash to solve some of the use cases. It's important to quickly get in touch with people and to get status update on certain things. We are still working on that.
Economic Times (ET): What are the new partnerships forged by Truecaller in India?
Alan Mamedi (AM): We introduced Truecaller Pay, which is a mobile payment service. We have collaborated with ICICI on the same, which will help users send and receive payments. Apart from that, we partnered with Airtel to introduce caller ID for Indians who use feature phones. Lastly, along with Google, we have integrated with the Duo video calling platform. Also, we have identified so far 2.2 billion incoming calls, 568 million outgoing calls and 500 million spam calls in a month.
ET: How do you look at Net Neutrality?
AM: We think it should be an open platform available to anyone, just the way we are building Truecaller. We are platform agnostic. Once you introduce net neutrality, you start keeping things away from people. Things they might not be aware of.
ET: How has the India centres contributed to your growth?
AM: We are now operating from Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. We have built our sales team, marketing team, partnership team, and now our engineering team is not only focusing on core products, but also on some India-specific integration into our product. We aim to grow the team fairly big this year.
ET: How will you stand out from the rest with this partnership with ICICI Bank?
AM: We partnered with ICICI Bank to launch a payments service based on government's UPI initiative. It's important because this is more than P2P and recharge. The way Truecaller works today is basically a collection of your contacts in the cloud that you don't need to worry about, and you can have this access whenever you need it. The way we have integrated with UPI, you will be able to make payments to anyone in your contacts that has any UPI address in a few clicks. We have double-layer security.In the first phase you get identity from Truecaller, and in the second you also get identity from the bank. This is important because we have seen a lot of frauds on text messages requesting for money.
ET: Where do you draw the line in terms of privacy?
AM: We have built our platform based on user requests. Our mission is to make communication safe and efficient. You can disable features if you don't want it. But it's actually a very powerful tool to make your communication better.
ET: Have you tied up with startups?
AM: A lot of collaboration in TrueSDK programme has happened which was launched earlier with startups like OYO Rooms. We collected their feedback before launching True caller SDK. Now it's even available on iOS and the web platform.We have integrated things like True caller SDK or True caller Priority for our developer community. More startups have been included in this programme.
ET: Has the SOS functionality in feature phones been rolled out?
AM: We are looking at it as a different product. We are working on flash to solve some of the use cases. It's important to quickly get in touch with people and to get status update on certain things. We are still working on that.
