UAE – December 2021

The Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA) announced that the feature of displaying the name of the calling entity from private sector companies in the UAE will be officially and gradually implemented during the coming period. TDRA had started the test implementation of this feature last May to the banking sector, to be the first in the region to apply this feature.

Displaying the caller’s ID initiative, known as “Kashif” initiative, informs customers about the caller’s ID, even if the caller’s contact info is not saved on the phone. This feature, which was launched by TDRA in cooperation with the service providers, aims to reduce anonymous calls received by customers and provides the caller’s information to the recipient before answering the call.

TDRA indicated that it has issued legislation related to this feature, as part of the development system aimed at enhancing customers' confidence in calls received from private sector companies, thus, reducing the inconvenience caused by anonymous calls.

Commenting on the new feature, Eng. Saif Bin Ghelaita, Director of Technology Development Affairs at TDRA, said: “TDRA, based on the directives of the wise leadership, launches and implements initiatives aimed at enhancing customers’ confidence in the telecommunications sector services. Accordingly, we launched this feature that enables customers to identify the names of the calling parties, which allows them to decide whether they would like to answer the call. Moreover, it gives them a kind of reassurance when receiving the call and talking to the caller.”

Eng. Bin Ghelaita added: “TDRA chose to implement this feature after reviewing a number of projects and best practices, and worked during the testing period in cooperation with the service providers to identify solutions to technical challenges, and to make modifications to the service provider networks to fully activate the new feature.”

TDRA initiated the implementation of this feature with the banking sector, to be applied to the rest of the sectors such as health, hospitality, education and other sectors on a later stage.  This feature will be applied to all private sector companies during 2022, and it will include fixed and mobile numbers registered under private sector companies.

TDRA emphasized that this feature is considered the first line of identifying the calling party, nevertheless, customers must abide by the directives of competent authorities regarding not revealing their personal information such as bank account number, PIN codes, passwords and others.