Skip to content
←Back to glossaryLaw & regulation

Onboarding

Identifying the customer when the relationship opens. If it fails, the regulated firm carries the regulatory liability.

Definition

Onboarding is the moment when an insurer or financial institution establishes the identity of its counterparty. Underwriting, claims settlement and anti-money-laundering duties all rest on it. Deepfakes weaken it and shift the burden: a deepfake that clears these controls is treated as a failure of due-diligence obligations, and not as a mere technical incident. The firm then faces a triple exposure, through the direct loss, the regulatory sanction and its own civil liability. The remedy is to stop treating identity as a threshold crossed once, and to make it a process of trust re-evaluated continuously.

Its 3 cross-references, woven across the glossary's 18 categories
Onboarding: Law & regulation glossary illustration, AlgoPolis
Example

One verification attempt in twenty was already fraudulent in 2024, and a single authentication failure triggers three distinct exposures.

Read next
Stay informed

Follow the research

One letter a week. First, the week's underwriting note, when one is published: a dated, argued decision, signed by Paul Bernardski. Then what the observatory published on cyber risk, political risk and insurance. No account, no tracking.

No spam, one-click unsubscribe, no data ever sold.