By Pete Farmer
We’ve mentioned it before, but it may have gotten lost in the excitement of the TSRs and the recent CLI changes and the myriad of other stuff being thrown at our industry over the parapets of Riverside House.
There’s a KYC requirement on sub-allocation of telephone numbers in the UK these days; our friends at Ofcom expect some checks on the allocation of numbers to businesses (including between entities in the resale chain, i.e. us to you, you to another reseller and not just reseller to end user) to be performed both on sign-up and on an ongoing basis.
The full information is here: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/consultations-and-statements/category-2/good-practice-guide-on-sub-allocated-assigned-numbers.
The rules are flexible because us adults in the industry lobbied Ofcom and pointed out that a rigid framework would stifle innovation. That’s why it is loose and leaves a lot to the relevant provider’s discretion. That looseness should not be mistaken for it not being taken seriously – it’s a clear direction of travel – if some foreign spiv performs some scrotitude pretending to be a bank or HMRC or something, Ofcom are going to come after who it is easy to come after – the UK based companies in the UK side of the supply chain. And Ofcom has the ability to shut you down, fine you 10% of your turnover (which to be fair, may amount to the same end result as shutting you down), send over the boys in blue for a dawn raid, or publish your name on the enforcement section of their website which has shockingly high weight in the Google rankings.
We like doing business with our customers and hope we continue to do business for a long time.
We’ve been doing a form of this for a while, before we had to, and all new sign-ups have had the light shone under their hoods since September. Existing customers are in a queue as we will have to do some checks periodically, so don’t be surprised if Frazer suddenly asks a random question of you about a majority shareholder that’s not a director, or asks in more detail about your use cases – it’s all to do with the latest cottage-industry within telecoms.
In the meantime, please don’t lose sight of it amongst all the other stuff we’re obliged to do! Any questions, drop Frazer a line.
