318 R. Vecellio Segate Segate 2022b, 62), but largely fails to specifically inspect ID-capturing devices as a function of the problematic role of introducers. When it comes to legal literature, instead, there is no paucity of sources on biometrics in migration control, the reasons why States implement these technologies, and the reasons why they are insidious from the standpoint of, for instance, privacy and non-discrimination laws (e.g. Casagran 2021; Díaz 2014; Thomas 2005). Legal scholars have discussed ad abundantiam – and mostly from a post-Marxist, biopolitics-of-exclusion perspective – the implications of biometric border control for e.g. stateless individuals and refugees (e.g. Nalbandian 2022), but they are yet to uncover the connections among the four aspects that I will be focusing on here: (1) the role of biometrics for remote identity onboarding as opposed to mere border control; (2) the design and enforcement of technical standards in borderline contexts; (3) the socio-legal challenges and limitations of implementing introducer-based onboarding systems; and (4) the controversial function of financial institutions (FIs) as enablers of these technologies and driving force behind their interoperable standardisation. This is interdisciplinary work whose approach is mainly regulatory, sociolegal, and policy-oriented. The expert legal reader will find that a few elementary concepts (such as the distinction between “refugees” and “migrants”, or indeed the one above between nationality and citizenship) are briefly recalled: this is done deliberately, in order to accommodate the diversity of an interdisciplinary readership. While this qualitative research is primarily intended for and addressed to a legal-policy audience, technical standard-setters and other professionals (engineers, computer scientists, managers, auditors) on the more “quantitative” side of regulatory endeavours, as well as development scholars, humanitarian actors, and critical scholars of technology, will hopefully draw meaningful contextual insights from this effort, too. The next sections will unfold as follows: Sections 2 and 3 will generally introduce the role of standards and the introducer as regulatory options towards trustworthy identity onboarding; Sections 4–7 will expand on each “borderline” situation separately, in order to outline their specific challenges vis-à-vis the introducer’s role and how standards may need skilled finetuning in order to address them; Section 8 will propose preliminary policy solutions to the highlighted issues, with specific reference to the three aforementioned research questions; Section 9 will conclude with an outlook on the warranted research ahead. 2 Standards’ Hegemonic Politics and Technical Attributes Technical standards are supposed to foster interoperability and facilitate crossborder transactions and operations, including via commonly agreed protocols for the