The DBA must be consistent with the legal name and every other field

The requirementstatement

The DBA must be recognisably the same business as the legal name, the website, and the campaign — not an unrelated third name.

Severityseverity: HighHIGHRejected by at least one carrier or provider, and a common cause of failure at the rest.
When it bitesphase: Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
What is checkedobject: brand.dba vs brand.company_name
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: AWSBandwidthHighLevel
When it appliesapplicabilityText: Applies to every 10DLC registration.

Why this rule existsrationale

Reviewers use the DBA as the bridge between a legal name nobody recognises and a website that carries a brand. When the DBA is a third, unrelated name, that bridge collapses and the registration reads as three businesses stapled together — which is what an unauthorised reseller registration actually looks like. Multi-brand retailers reach this honestly by putting the group name in one field and a shopfront in another.

How to fix itremediation

Set the DBA to the name customers actually see from this brand — the one on the website header and in the message sender line. If the business genuinely trades under several names, register a separate brand per name rather than listing one and messaging under another. Done when the DBA, the website title and the name in the samples are the same business.

A compliant exampleexample

company_name: Acme Coffee Co, LLC · dba: Acme Coffee · website: acmecoffee.com — one business, three consistent renderings

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	30918	Yes

Notesnotes

Bandwidth grades this MEDIUM and AWS HIGH; the strictest is kept per the strict-superset model.

Rules you will hit next

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

BRD-006Submit every name line above the address on a multi-line IRS recordHighHIGH BRD-007TCR takes only the first line of the IRS-registered nameHighHIGH BRD-010Take the legal name from the CP-575 or 147C, never a W-2 or W-9HighHIGH BRD-014An acquired business registers the details it filed taxes underHighHIGH BRD-027EIN must be old enough to have propagated to IRS recordsHighHIGH BRD-034Validate a non-US identifier against its home register before submittingHighHIGH

All brand rules

BRD-146 is one of 196 brand rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.