A brand must be a business, not a person

The requirementstatement

Outside the sole-proprietor tier, the registered brand must be a business entity rather than an individual's personal identity.

Severityseverity: BlockingBLOCKINGBreaking this rule gets the submission rejected. There is no partial credit.
When it bitesphase: Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
What is checkedobject: brand.company_name + brand.entity_type
Where it liveslayer: BrandBRAND
How Ekas settles itdetectability: AI · formAI_FORM; A semantic question about what you wrote: whether a description matches a use case, whether a name looks like a filed entity. Judged by a model against written criteria.
What the fix involvesfailureClass: Fix the fieldRETRY_FIELD; A better value in the form fixes it. Ekas can rewrite it and re-check.
Who requires itauthorities: Twilio
When it appliesapplicabilityText: Applies when the brand is NOT a sole proprietor.

Why this rule existsrationale

A2P messaging is registered to businesses because the whole accountability chain — the tax record, the vetting report, the complaint route — hangs off a business existing. An individual registering under their own name outside the sole-proprietor tier has no such record, so nothing can be verified and the brand is refused. It happens honestly: consultants, coaches and creators genuinely trade as themselves, and the standard tier is the one the form defaults to.

How to fix itremediation

If the business is a registered entity, use its registered name and EIN. If it genuinely is you trading as yourself, switch to the sole-proprietor tier, which verifies by mobile OTP instead of by tax record and expects exactly a personal name. Done when the entity type and the name agree about what is being registered.

A compliant exampleexample

company_name: Acme Coffee Co, LLC on the standard tier — or "Jane Doe" on the sole-proprietor tier, never a person's name on the standard one

Common mistakespitfalls

Adding "Consulting" to your own name does not create an entity. If there is no registration behind the words, the standard tier still has nothing to verify.

Provider rejection codescodes

The code you get back when this rule is what failed, and whether that provider lets you resubmit.

Provider	Code	Resubmit
Twilio	30928	Yes

Notesnotes

The inverse of BRD-068, which requires a personal name on the sole-proprietor tier. The two are tagged to opposite sides of the same dimension so exactly one fires per registration.

Rules you will hit next

Other brand rules at the same severity. A registration is judged as a whole, not rule by rule.

BRD-001A legal company name is required for every entity but a sole proprietorBlockingBLOCKING BRD-002Legal name must match the IRS record for the EINBlockingBLOCKING BRD-003Legal name must carry its exact entity suffix as filedBlockingBLOCKING BRD-008Legal name must not carry an appended personal name or roleBlockingBLOCKING BRD-009The legal name field takes the legal name, not the trading nameBlockingBLOCKING BRD-011A legal business name may back only one brand across the whole registryBlockingBLOCKING

All brand rules

BRD-013 is one of 196 brand rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.