Text messages are sure to reach people and unfortunately, SMS has also been an effective communication channel for scammers. Forgery of sender information, misleading pseudonyms and messages that look genuine have led to situations where it has been almost impossible for the recipient to distinguish a genuine message from a scam. Traficom is now addressing this with a new regulation.
Regulation 28 L/2025 M of the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom will enter into force on 4 May 2026 and will bring significant changes to the way in which organisations and companies' sender data is identified and verified in Finland.
Reliability of sender data is the basis of communication
The premise of the new regulation is clear: the recipient must be able to trust the sender of the message as much as the content of the message itself.
In future, telecoms operators will have to ensure that the sender of an SMS message has access to the Finnish telephone number or their name.
Summary of the main changes
The Traficom order brings several concrete changes to the thread:
- The regulation applies to SMS, MMS and RCS messages
- The telecoms company must ensure that the sender ID used by the organisation or company is correct and unique.
- From the public international interface, messages are not received with a named sender identifier
- Application Programming Interfaces (APIs):
- - the sender ID of the organisation or company sending the messages must be identified
- - the sender must have access to a Finnish telephone number
- - the name of the sender must be clearly linked to the sender's activity
- If the information cannot be verified, the message is blocked or the sender's ID is changed.
- The telecoms company can agree that the SMS service provider (such as Quriiri) will take care of identification and authentication.
- Statistical obligations have been added in order to give the authorities a better snapshot of the traffic situation.
The Traficom regulation only applies to companies and organisations. Individuals can send messages as before.
Sending messages from 4.5.2026 onwards
After the entry into force of the Traficom regulation, there are two parallel ways of managing SMS sender IDs in Finland: authorisation of the sender's identification number and protection of the sender ID. At Quriiri, we help our customers choose the right solution for their needs and take care of the practical implementation on your behalf.
Authorisation (mandatory from 4.5.2026)
All telephone numbers and named sender identifiers used in Finland must be licensed to local telecoms companies. This applies to all SMS sender IDs. Authorisation is easily done via Quriirin. We take care of the licensing with all operators in Finland and manage the process together with our customers.
Protection (optional)
In addition, the consignor reference number can be protected by registering it with Traficom. With this protection, the company is granted exclusive to the relevant sender identifier in the form of a name. After registration, Quriiri takes care of deploying the protection and cooperating with the operators on behalf of the customer.
What happens if the sender ID is not authorised or registered?
After the transition period, if messages are sent using an unauthorised or unregistered sender ID, the consequences are clear:
• from 4.5.2026
→ the sender ID is changed to “Unknown”
• from 2.11.2026
→ message delivery is blocked or the sender ID is changed to “Spam”
What does this mean for businesses and organisations?
In practice, this means one thing: the numbers and personal identification numbers in use must be authorised or registered in good time. Our customers do not need to do anything yet. We Quriirilla:
- we go through the sender IDs used by our customers
- we contact each customer individually
- we ensure that sender information is correctly identified and authorisations are in order
- ensure that the codes comply with Traficom regulations
- ensure that messages continue to be forwarded to phones with the correct sender ID.
We will work with our customers to go through the practicalities of authorisation, and will also provide convenient tools for authorising and managing sender data.
Any questions? Contact us, we are happy to help!
