The American Bankers Association today led a group of eight financial trade associations in expressing support for proposals by the Federal Communications Commission that would adopt several ABA requests to modernize the FCC’s Telephone Consumer Protection Act rules. In addition, while expressing support for the FCC’s seperate proposals to combat illegal call spoofing, the associations urged the FCC to go further in requiring wireless providers to stop fraudsters from impersonating legitimate companies and gaining consumers’ trust.
The TCPA is a 1991 law that regulates telemarketing and informational calls using an autodialer or artificial or prerecorded voice. The FCC proposed to make several changes to the FCC’s TCPA rules that ABA had urged the commission to make. They include modifying a 2024 rule that broadly expanded what messages are covered when a customer revokes consent (the “revoke all” rule); eliminating the “provided number” condition that allows banks and other financial institutions to place calls under an existing exemption for fraud alerts only to numbers that were provided by the customer.
As for combating illegal call spoofing, the associations expressed support for the FCC’s proposals to enhance the effectiveness of the STIR/SHAKEN call authentication framework and to require voice service providers that transmit caller identity information to employ reasonable measures to verify the accuracy of the information transmitted, among other changes. The associations urged the FCC to go further and finalize rules that specify the procedures that voice service providers that originate calls must take to comply with an existing rule that requires providers to take effective steps to ensure that it does not transmit illegal calls.
The associations also urged the commission to require originating providers to verify the caller has the legal right to the number that will be displayed in the recipient’s caller ID.
