Bharti Airtel is finalising talks with Google to launch Rich Communication Services (RCS), the last of India’s three major mobile players to partner with the US search giant to offer the enhanced communications tool, The Economic Times (ET) reported.

The operator, the second-largest in India by subscribers, previously declined to introduce RCS due to concerns over spam.

The newspaper wrote Google recently agreed to integrate RCS with Airtel’s AI-enabled spam filter.

A source told ET the country’s operators now need to work out interoperability, which could result in an interconnect usage charge.

In August, Apple sealed its first RCS deal in India, working with Reliance Jio to enable the messaging on iPhones.

The GSMA, Google and a number of operators created an initiative covering implementation of RCS on Android devices in 2016.

Compared with SMS or MMS, the GSMA claims RCS enables better features across payments, chatbots, location sharing, high-resolution images and videos, and group chats.