RCS senders & verification

Before you can send RCS, you create a sender, add the countries you want to operate in, complete the required data, submit it for review and follow its status until it's active. This page walks through that process end to end. The agent profile itself — fields, image specs, live previews — has its own page: Your RCS agent profile.

Senders and registers

A sender is your brand identity, created once inside the project, just like an SMS sender. To use it in a country, you create and get approved a register specific to that country. And inside that register you configure the RCS agent profile the contacts in that market will see.

So there are three distinct, nested things: a sender groups the registers for each country, and each register holds the agent profile for its market. Because each country is handled on its own, the same sender can be active in one country and still under review in another — and it can only send to a country once that country's register is fully cleared.

Create the sender

Go to Settings > Project > Channels > RCS. If you don't have a sender yet, the Set up your RCS channel checklist walks you through the stages: create the sender, register the agent for a country and send your first campaign.

Click Create Sender. The Create RCS sender form asks for three decisions:

• Display name — the name the end user sees for your brand in their messaging app.
• Billing category — how messages are billed. Both categories have the same features; what changes is the billing model. Non conversational is billed per sent / received message; Conversational (billed per opened conversation) is not available yet and shows a Coming soon badge.
• Use case — the kind of messages you'll send: Verification codes (OTP), Transactional, Promotional or Mixed.

Click Create Sender. The sender sheet opens, with no countries registered yet.

Register it for a country

Click Add country. The Register RCS agent for a country form asks for the Country, the Name recipients will see (up to 40 characters) and an optional Description (up to 100 characters). Click Create draft.

While the registration is a draft you can edit it freely — but as the form warns, this data cannot be modified once submitted for verification. The draft opens on a sheet with three tabs: Agent Profile, Organization and Compliance.

The Agent Profile tab

Your brand identity: name, description, color, logo, banner, contact details and legal URLs, with a live preview of how contacts will see it. Every field and its limits are detailed in Your RCS agent profile.

The Organization tab

Here you state who's behind the brand and how you collect consent from your contacts. This is the information Google and the operators review to approve the agent, so it's worth filling in carefully: incomplete or unconvincing data is a common reason for rejection.

• Contacts responsible for the agent — at least one, up to five. Each contact has a Full name, Job title and email, added with Add contact. It should be a real person at the organization, with first and last name and a named corporate email (firstname.lastname@company.com). Avoid generic addresses like info@company.com or support@company.com: this person will receive an email from Google to approve brand usage, and a shared inbox often goes unread and stalls the approval.
• How do you obtain consent to send messages? — describe how you collect consent from the people who'll receive the messages (up to 1000 characters). The panel puts it this way: "It is important to provide details on how you obtain consent. If acceptance is done through a website or app, please include links or URLs to screenshots." Be specific about the moment and the mechanism — for example, "The user agrees to receive communications when signing up on our website through an explicit consent checkbox" — and, if acceptance happens on your website or app, add links, URLs or screenshots as evidence. It's required for the Transactional, Promotional and Mixed use cases, and optional for Verification codes (OTP).
• Test phone numbers — optional, up to five. Added with Add phone, each with its country prefix (for example +34). The panel describes them as "Optional — we may send test messages to these numbers during registration.": they let the review check the agent on a real device, so it helps to include at least one.

The Compliance tab

This is where you complete the legal side of the register. It has two elements:

• Filing — only appears when the country has a regulator. It sets how the request is filed with the regulator. I'll file it myself comes selected, and it's the recommended option: it's the short path, for when you've already registered the alias yourself. The alternative is Instasent files for you, which adds the paperwork we have to fill in on your behalf.
• Legal profile — required for every register, whether or not the country has a regulator. It holds the legal-entity data (registered company name, tax ID) submitted to the regulator and the operators. These are the same legal profiles used for SMS senders, so if your organization already registered SMS senders you can reuse the same one. You pick it with Select profile.

This data weighs directly on the decision: a correct legal profile and an entity consistent with the agent's brand help the approval go through, while incomplete data, a company name that doesn't match the brand, or an unconvincing responsible contact are frequent reasons for rejection. Neither the filing type nor the legal profile has its own save inside the tab — both are saved when you Save draft.

Submit it for review

With the three tabs complete, the draft's footer offers two actions: Delete draft, to discard it, and Submit request, to send it for review.

Click Submit request. The Submit RCS agent for review form sums up what to verify before confirming: name and description, logo and banner dimensions, legal URLs, contact details and organization information — once approved, the agent data cannot be modified.

Click Confirm and submit. The registration moves to In review: Instasent reviews your agent and manages the registration with the operators on your behalf. The first review may take up to 48 hours; full approval with the operators can take up to 4 weeks, depending on the country.

Meanwhile the channel keeps you posted: the Needs your attention section of the RCS channel shows Agents in review. Watch out for one detail that catches people out: registrations still in draft are counted there too, so the number isn't only the ones awaiting a decision — some of them are waiting on you.

Following your register's status

Each country row on the sender sheet shows a single status that tells you where the register stands and whether the sender can send there. Behind it are two layers, and the sender can send only once both are clear:

• The operator layer — where the agent stands with Instasent and the mobile operators.
• The regulator layer — where it stands with the country's regulator, when that country has one. Most countries have no RCS regulator and skip this layer.

Status	What it means	Clear to send?
Draft	Saved but not submitted. Fully editable.	No
In review	Submitted; Instasent is reviewing the agent.	No
With operator	Passed the first review; being registered with the operators.	No
With regulator	Submitted to the country's regulator, awaiting their response.	No
Accepted	Approved — the agent can send in this country.	Yes
Rejected	Declined, with the reason shown on the register.	No
Revoked	A previously granted authorization was withdrawn.	No
Archived	Retired. Register a new version to replace it.	No

stateDiagram-v2
    state "In review" as InReview
    state "With operator" as WithOperator
    state "With regulator" as WithRegulator
    [*] --> Draft: create register
    Draft --> InReview: Submit request
    InReview --> Draft: Cancel review and edit
    InReview --> WithOperator: first review passed
    WithOperator --> WithRegulator: sent to regulator (if any)
    WithOperator --> Accepted: approved (no regulator)
    WithRegulator --> Accepted: regulator authorizes
    InReview --> Rejected: declined
    WithOperator --> Rejected: declined
    WithRegulator --> Rejected: regulator declines
    Accepted --> Revoked: authorization withdrawn
    Accepted --> Archived: retire or replace
    Archived --> [*]

    class Accepted success
    class Rejected destructive
    class Revoked destructive

If a register is rejected

When a register is rejected, the reason is shown on the register. A rejected register is final: to try again you register a new version of the agent — and contact support if you need help. The common reasons — and how to avoid them up front — are in RCS agent best practices.

A previously approved register can also be pulled back — for example if an operator suspends the agent, or a regulator revokes a granted authorization. If that happens, Instasent handles the next steps; contact support if you need help moving forward. Country-specific rules live in Countries & regulation.

Reach more countries

From the sender sheet, Add country opens a new registration with the form pre-filled from your existing profile — name, description, images and contacts included. You only adjust what changes for that destination and submit. The regulatory classification is not inherited: it's specific to each country.

Once a registration is approved, your sender is Active in that country and you can select it when creating a campaign. Each country's status is visible at a glance in the channel's senders list.

Whether RCS is available in a country, and for which contacts, is covered in Availability & rollout.