Onboarding (Customer / Account Onboarding)

Onboarding is the sequence of steps a business runs a new user through to turn them from a visitor into an account holder, collecting the information the business needs, proving that information is genuine where it matters, and setting the account up so the person can start using the product. For a regulated business, the compliance backbone of onboarding is CDD (see CDD): the identity check, the risk assessment, and the record-keeping both the regulator and the business need in order to open the account at all. For an unregulated consumer app, onboarding can be as thin as an email address and a password.

The single most important thing to understand about onboarding, for anyone building or buying an identity-verification product, is that it's the point where a business loses the most prospective customers. Every extra form field, every document upload, every wait for manual review is a place someone abandons the flow instead of finishing it, which is why "onboarding drop-off" or "abandonment rate" is one of the most closely watched numbers at any fintech, bank, or wallet provider. It's also the reason the entire reusable-credential idea (see Credential Portability) exists in the first place: the same person re-runs the identical scan-and-selfie step at every new app they join, and cutting that repetition is worth real, measurable conversion to whoever removes it.

Who actually built this

Nobody owns "onboarding" the way FATF owns CDD or the EU owns eIDAS, it's product and UX vocabulary that predates any identity-verification vendor, borrowed from general SaaS/consumer-product practice (funnel analysis, activation metrics) and combined with whatever compliance obligation the business's own regulator imposes. Solidus contributes nothing to either half of that; it plugs into the compliance half.

Solidus today

Solidus Verify Capture ships the identity-verification step of onboarding as an embeddable component, document capture, liveness, and face match, that a business drops into its own signup flow, live and testable today. It is not a full onboarding platform: account creation, terms acceptance, and product-specific setup all remain the business's own, and the CDD steps beyond identification aren't part of it either.

See also

KYC and IDV are the specific checks that make up the identity-verification step of onboarding. CDD is the fuller compliance obligation a regulated onboarding flow has to satisfy. Credential Portability is why repeating the same onboarding step at every new business is the exact inefficiency Solidus is built to remove.