the register applies when you call companies too. The Italian opt-out register and B2B calls

The register’s website defines a “citizen” as any holder of a phone contract: a natural person, a legal entity, a body or an association. A company can therefore register its switchboard number, and the owner of a small business can register the mobile they work with. The duty on the other side is symmetrical: anyone using Italian numbers for sales, advertising, commercial communication or market research has to register and consult the register. The law does not distinguish between private and business numbers.

You will often read online that the register “does not apply to B2B”. The claim comes from the fact that the GDPR protects natural persons and that limited companies rarely register. The register, though, is not the GDPR: it is a separate law, with its own list and its own sanction, and it accepts companies. The prudent reading, which is the one we apply on our campaigns, is to check the whole list and discuss borderline cases with the privacy adviser, not to skip the check.

A B2B list looks like a list of companies, but it is a list of numbers, and many of those numbers are registered to people. The owner’s mobile shown on the website as “sales”. The sole trader’s number, which is the business and the person at once. The landline of the professional practice, the workshop or the shop, registered to whoever works there. They are the numbers a salesperson most likes to call, because someone answers, and they are the ones most often in the register.

Switchboards of limited companies and toll-free numbers are rarely there. Deciding number by number which ones to check, though, takes longer than a full check and leaves whoever decided holding the responsibility for the mistake. That is why the whole list gets checked: the register answers on the entire file in one go.

The register asks operators to consult it every month and in any case before every phone campaign. The answer is valid for fifteen days, because registrations change every day: a list cleaned at the start of the month contains, by the end of it, numbers that registered in the meantime.

There are moments when the check is needed outside the calendar too: when a list arrives from a supplier, when an archive that has sat idle for years is picked up again, when the calls are handed to an outside call centre and when mobiles are added to a list of landlines. In all these cases the previous check, if there was one, does not cover the new numbers.

The register tells you who not to call. It does not tell you on what basis you may call everyone else. In B2B that basis is usually legitimate interest, which has to be written down and justified before the campaign, together with the privacy notice to give whoever answers. Anyone who asks during the call not to be called again is noted at once and respected, and the data is kept for the length of the campaign and no longer.

Since June 2025 there is also a code of conduct for telemarketing and telesales in Italy, approved by the data protection authority: following it gives you one more way to show you worked correctly. This page explains how the check works; the legal basis of your campaign is something you define with your privacy adviser, and we are glad to sit at the same table.

Companies that call with their own sales team can hand us this part alone: they send us the list and receive the callable numbers, the excluded ones and the report. That is our opt-out register list cleaning service. Companies that also want the calls start here for a B2B telemarketing or appointment setting campaign, made by people and measured on calls, duration, appointments and confirmations. New lists are built as profiled, GDPR compliant lists.