Truecaller adds Payments and Google Duo to its App

Truecaller has expanded its portfolio and has integrated payments, Google Duo and offline Truecaller facility for feature phone users in a series of announcements in the capital. The new Truecaller app has been redesigned and now comes with a broader array of useful features including:

SMS: Instantly see who is messaging 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.

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.”

Utilising its mobile identity platform Truecaller has partnered with ICICI Bank to build a financial service to provide 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 and non-ICICI users as well.

In terms of security, a 2-factor authentication is followed as per RBI guidelines. All the banking and transactional data of the customers is securely handled by ICICI bank conforming to NPCI and RBI guidelines. Truecaller has claimed that it will not park any money or handle sensitive data such as account details, credit/debit card information of its users.

Truecaller has also announced a first of its 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.

Truecaller is also going to integrate Google Duo within the Truecaller app. This 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.