As we mentioned last week, the new Payment Services Directive seems to have taken the industry a little by surprise, and basic compliance (i.e. capping the cost of a call) has needed to be implemented quickly. We have now done it, but please see the previous post (linked above) for details.
Now, having had to limit the maximum wholesale cost for calls, it seemed logical for us to make this a more useful fraud-mitigation feature. For years you have been able to set a maximum call rate (per minute) and a maximum connection charge, either as a fixed value per trunk or passed through a SIP header per-call. This is a well used, albeit very basic, fraud control. We’ve added two more…
Now, you can set a maximum duration for calls per account, per trunk, or per call. Account-level limits can be set by our Operations Desk, the trunk-level values are set through the portal or the API, whilst the per call values are set in SIP headers. This one defaults to 4 hours on all calls (i.e. 14400 seconds) where not set, but this can be overridden now.
Of more interest might be the ability to set a maximum cost for the call in your billing currency. By default we’re applying the PSD2 legal limit of GBP 40 (or equivalent) on all calls but you can specify a lower level on the account, on the trunk, or a specific call. As with the others, the account-level limit is set by our Operations Desk if you require it, whilst trunk-level values are set through the portal or the API, and the per call values are set in SIP headers.
Documentation for our SIP extensions is in our knowledgebase and the PDF here. Control of the new trunk-level parameters will make it to the deployed API and portal in the next release – there’s more goodies committed ahead of them.
Given many Simwood competitors have failed to notify their customers of this change in the law, we highly doubt they have done anything at all about implementing the restrictions. We reckon we can hear ‘me too’ cranking up their very weary photocopier though in order to procure the necessary magic box. That’s a big risk for them and their resellers given there is now a legal limit on the cost of certain calls that they can’t enforce – that looks to us like a whole new fraud vector. Thankfully, and yet again, Simwood customers are protected first.
