Payment Institutions
Payment institutions, EMIs, and PSPs operate under some of the most demanding AML and sanctions obligations in financial services — at the highest transaction volumes. First Mile Labs orchestrates KYB onboarding, UBO verification, perpetual screening, and risk-based decisioning into a single workflow that scales with your portfolio and stands up to a regulator file review.
Why First Mile Labs
Continuous sanctions, PEP, and adverse media screening across every individual and entity, every day. 200+ lists including OFAC, UN, EU, and HM Treasury — with configurable match thresholds tuned to your false-positive tolerance.
Risk-based customer due diligence, source-of-funds capture, ongoing monitoring, and full SAR-ready audit trails. The control framework regulators expect from payment institutions and EMIs — wired into the workflow rather than bolted on after the fact.
Process thousands of merchant and corporate onboardings per month with auto-approval for clean cases and analyst escalation only where it adds value. Every decision, override, and screening hit captured immutably for the regulator and the auditor.
Coverage figures are indicative of the aggregate reach of the third-party providers First Mile Labs orchestrates, not data First Mile Labs owns. Actual coverage depends on the vendors you connect and your own commercial terms with them.
Segment focus
Payment institutions, EMIs, and PSPs operate under PSD2 and EMD2 in the European Union and FCA authorisation in the United Kingdom — a regulatory framework that imposes KYB and AML obligations every bit as stringent as those applied to credit institutions. What is rarely true is that the compliance function is the same size. A payment institution of materially the same customer count as a small bank will routinely run a compliance team a fraction of the size, while still being expected to evidence the same standard of customer due diligence, ongoing monitoring, and SAR-ready record-keeping at a regulator file review.
Payment institutions also sit on top of significantly higher transaction volumes per onboarded counterparty than a retail bank. That structural difference changes the risk calculus on every onboarding decision: a single missed UBO, a stale sanctions check, or a mis-categorised counterparty creates outsized regulatory and financial exposure once the customer starts moving real money. Per-counterparty diligence at onboarding and continuously across the relationship is not a nice-to-have — it is the only credible defence against the kind of incident that produces enforcement action.
Onboarding speed is also a direct commercial lever in the payments sector. Payment institutions compete for merchant, marketplace, and platform customers who can — and do — switch providers based on time to first transaction. A KYB process measured in weeks is a commercial disadvantage when a competitor onboards the same customer in days, and even more so when the customer is a fast-growing fintech or marketplace that needs to launch a product on a fixed deadline. Speed is no longer a back-office efficiency conversation — it shows up in win rates.
Common challenges
Payment institutions onboard volumes that grow faster than headcount can be added. Automation is not a productivity gain — it is the only sustainable answer once the pipeline reliably exceeds what a small team can manually review.
Payment institutions onboard businesses from high-risk jurisdictions far more frequently than retail banks. That demands multi-layer sanctions, PEP, and adverse-media screening tuned for higher signal-to-noise and a tighter false-positive band.
International payment businesses very often sit beneath layered holding structures spanning several jurisdictions. Resolving ultimate beneficial ownership manually across that many registries is slow and error-prone; automated cross-registry resolution is the only realistic answer.
Perpetual KYB monitoring across a large portfolio of payment counterparties cannot be a quarterly batch job. It has to be continuous, automated, and alert-driven — periodic manual reviews simply do not catch state changes fast enough at this volume.
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