FAQ

You will be required to provide SGNIC with the whitelisted path for the Sender IDs you will be registering, and will need to sign a User Agreement.  After the User Agreement is accepted and signed, you will need to provide the whitelist and blacklist Sender IDs which you wish to register with the Registry. Please reach out to SGNIC at [email protected] and our staff will guide you along the way.

The User Agreement will reflect the fee schedule when we send it to you. The prevailing fees will be S$500 for a one-time set up, and an annual charge of S$1,000 for a block of 10 Sender IDs (can be a mix of whitelist or blacklist Sender IDs). Subsequent IDs will be charged in blocks of 10 as well. Prices are listed before Goods & Services Tax. SGNIC may review the fees periodically and users will be informed in advance prior fees changes.

The contract is on-going until either party terminates the agreement with a 30-day notice to the other party.

Participating Aggregators are SMS Aggregators licensed by the Infocommunications Media Development Authority (IMDA) to undertake the delivery of SMSes with Sender IDs registered with SGNIC.  They are listed at: https://sgnic.sg/docs/default-source/sms-registry/listpa.pdf 

The 4 Mobile Network Operators (M1, Singtel Mobile, Starhub Mobile and Simba Telecom (formerly TPG) are included in the list of participating entities that can manage whitelisted Sender IDs.

Each Sender ID (whether whitelist or blacklist) cannot exceed 11 characters (including spaces, underscores or hyphens), cannot contain Chinese or Cyrillic characters, and should not be generic in nature. Mobile numbers cannot be accepted as Sender IDs with the Registry.

Possible variations include changing uppercase to lowercase, changing letters to similar looking numbers e.g. O/0, B/8, 1/L, the adding of hyphens, etc.

This is possible if the shortcode is used to communicate to the public (i.e., not internally within the organisation) and the shortcode is applied across all 4 Mobile Network Operators.

If you submit your Sender IDs to SGNIC before Tuesday 17:00hrs, SGNIC will coordinate with the Participating Aggregators and Mobile Network Operators to effect the list the following Tuesday 10:00hrs, if there is no issue with the submitted data. For whitelist Sender IDs, please ensure that the path has been fully whitelisted before submitting the Sender IDs.

If you have an urgent need to remove a whitelisted Sender ID because SMS messages are dropping, you should cease the use of that whitelisted Sender ID until such time that either (i) the Sender ID has been offloaded from the Aggregators according to the schedule above, or (ii) the organisation’s investigation into the dropped messages has been successfully concluded.

Organisations are strongly encouraged to test the whitelist route using non-critical whitelist Sender IDs first, before placing mission critical whitelist Sender IDs into the Registry, and to confirm that the delivery route of their Sender IDs comprises entirely of Participating Aggregators.

Please inform SGNIC immediately at [email protected].

You should engage your SMS Aggregator to investigate the issue. You may wish to keep SGNIC in the loop when you check with your SMS Aggregator.

In the event there are any new or changed delivery paths, you should ensure that all Aggregators in these paths are included in the list of Participating Aggregators. You should also resubmit a revised <SMS Aggregators and path.doc> document to capture the revised paths. Similarly, if there are obsolete paths, you should submit an updated <SMS Aggregators and path.doc> to SGNIC as well.

If additions made to Sender IDs exceed the current block(s) of Sender IDs already paid for, you will be charged for an additional full block of 10 Sender IDs for the year. There will be no pro-rating involved. 

The Registry is not providing this information for the moment. You may wish to check with the SMS Aggregator(s) you are working with.

An organisation may authorise a representative to send SMS with the organisation’s registered Sender ID on its behalf. For example, a marketing firm is appointed by an organisation to run a marketing campaign for the organisation. To authorise the representative to send such SMS with the registered Sender ID on the organisation’s behalf, a  Letter of Authorisation (LoA) provided by the organisation who registered that Sender ID is required. The representative will need to provide the LoA to the participating aggregator engaged for the sending of the SMS. 

You can download the template here.

Yes, IMDA will issue the directive to the licensee to comply with the set of requirements.

Any protection by the Registry will be applied to Singapore mobile numbers only. Participating aggregators can choose to deliver such SMS messages carrying registered Sender IDs to foreign mobile numbers if they are able to support this. The sending organisation should specifically check with its aggregator that it has the ability to distinguish between local and foreign recipients, and can protect the local recipients while allowing the messages to be delivered to foreign recipients. However, the organisation should note that such SMS messages to foreign recipients would not be protected.