# BRD-277 — High-risk financial services brands are not carried

> A brand whose business is high-risk financial services — payday and short-term lending, indirect loan marketing, stock alerts or crypto must not be registered for A2P messaging.

- **Rule ID:** BRD-277
- **Layer:** Brand (`BRAND`)
- **Checks:** `brand.vertical + brand fields + website content`
- **Severity:** BLOCKING — Breaking this rule gets the submission rejected outright.
- **When it bites:** Gates approval — get this wrong and registration is refused
- **How it is detected:** AI judgement over the submitted form; AI judgement over the crawled website or policy page
- **Fix type:** Hard stop — not remediable, resubmission will not help
- **Required by:** AWS, Bandwidth, Bird, Infobip, Sinch, Plivo, Vonage
- **Applies:** Applies to every 10DLC registration.
- **Canonical URL:** https://ekas.io/rules/10dlc/brand/brd-277/

## Why this rule exists

This category is where SMS fraud concentrates, so carriers exclude the business model rather than reading each campaign — the same message from a first-party lender and from a lead-selling loan site is indistinguishable in a text and very different in consequence. The cost of the blanket rule is that legitimate, licensed, first-party lenders get caught by it unless the carve-out is applied deliberately.

## How to fix it

Where the business is a licensed first-party lender servicing its own loans, say so explicitly in the brand description and the campaign — the carve-out is real and it turns on first-party servicing. Where the business markets credit it does not originate, or promotes securities or crypto, it cannot be registered.

## Provider rejection codes

| Provider | Code | Resubmission allowed |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Bandwidth | `709` | no |
| Sinch | `CR2014` | no |

## Notes

The first-party carve-out is load-bearing and is the same one MSG-HIGH-RISK-FINANCIAL carries at the campaign layer; fixture 5 of the golden corpus exists to keep it from being dropped. Sinch permits 2FA-only traffic for stocks, investing and crypto businesses, which is why that carve-out is stated separately.