Financial institutions have invested billions into compliance infrastructure, yet business onboarding remains one of the most expensive and operationally fragile parts of the customer lifecycle. Applications sit in queues for weeks. Analysts review documents by hand that could be automated. Ownership structures that should resolve in minutes wait days for a data provider to respond. And every institution has assembled a different patchwork of vendors — none of whom integrate cleanly — while the compliance team absorbs the cost of making it all work.
First Mile Labs was founded by someone who carried that weight. Matthew Goodbody spent more than ten years working inside KYB and KYC programmes at banks, cross-border payment businesses, and regulated financial institutions — not as a consultant parachuting in, but as an operator responsible for real onboarding outcomes, real risk decisions, and real customer experience. The same problems appeared everywhere: disconnected systems, inconsistent risk decisions, high manual burden, and slow time-to-revenue.
The insight behind First Mile Labs is straightforward. Compliance teams don't need another vendor to replace the ones they've already deployed — they need something that sits above the stack and orchestrates it. First Mile Labs connects your existing IDV provider, AML screening tool, and KYB data partner, applies your exact risk rules consistently across every case, and automates the decisions that meet your thresholds. The cases that genuinely require human judgement arrive fully pre-packaged: documents verified, UBO ownership mapped, checks complete, flags surfaced. Analysts spend their time on decisions, not data gathering.
The results are measurable. Onboarding journeys that took 90 days have been compressed to three. Manual review queues cut by over 70%. Straight-through processing rates above 80% for standard-risk applicants. These aren't projections — they are the operational outcomes that come from replacing fragmented, manual processes with consistent, rules-driven automation. That is what First Mile Labs was built to deliver.
Matthew has spent over a decade working at the intersection of compliance, onboarding, and product inside regulated financial institutions. His background spans banks, fintechs, and cross-border payment businesses — roles that required understanding KYB and KYC not as abstract frameworks but as operational realities: how ownership structures are verified, how risk decisions get made consistently at scale, and what happens when they don't.
That experience — living through the pain of fragmented vendor stacks, slow manual processes, and inconsistent risk decisions — is precisely what shaped First Mile Labs. First Mile Labs is not a company built on a whitepaper or a consulting thesis. It is built on the specific, hard-won knowledge of what compliance teams actually need, and what the market's current tooling fails to deliver.
What we're building
First Mile Labs is a vendor-agnostic orchestration layer for corporate onboarding. It integrates with the IDV, AML, and KYB providers you already use, enforces your risk rules consistently across every case, and automates the straight-through approvals that shouldn't need human time. For the cases that do, it delivers analysts a complete, pre-packaged review pack — so decisions take minutes, not days.
The platform covers the full compliance lifecycle: KYB and KYC verification, UBO and ownership structure mapping, AML screening and sanctions checking, identity verification, document intelligence, perpetual monitoring, and risk scoring. It is designed to be deployed inside banks, payment institutions, and any regulated organisation that onboards legal entities at volume.
Why "First Mile Labs"
The first mile is the most important mile in a customer relationship — the moment where trust is established, risk is assessed, and the experience can either build confidence or create friction that costs you the relationship entirely. "Labs" reflects the company's commitment to doing the unglamorous, technical work of experimenting and building better solutions to old, expensive problems. Together: a company focused on getting the first mile right.
See it in action
Book a demo and see how First Mile Labs can reduce your onboarding time and manual review burden from day one.