Carrier onboarding software that vets before you book.

Onboarding is where bad carriers get in

The traditional carrier onboarding process runs on trust extended too early. A carrier emails about your load, sounds legitimate, quotes a workable rate — and someone on your team opens FMCSA Safer, types in the MC number, glances at the authority status and insurance date, and starts the packet. That manual lookup takes 2–4 minutes per carrier, so with 40-odd replies per posted load it simply doesn't happen on most of them. Vetting gets rationed to the carriers you were already inclined to book.

That rationing is exactly what double-brokers and chameleon carriers exploit. The fraudulent reply is designed to look like the one you don't need to check — established-sounding name, confident quote, plausible email signature. The tell is in the data: an MC registered three weeks ago, an email domain registered eleven days before the reply, an insurance certificate that expires before your load delivers. None of that is visible in the email body. All of it is visible to software that checks every reply.

Keelway moves vetting from "once, at onboarding, by hand" to "automatically, on every reply, before anyone reads it." Onboarding stops being the gate where fraud slips through and becomes a formality you run only for carriers who already passed.

What Keelway checks on every inbound carrier

Built for the 2–10 person brokerage

Enterprise brokerages solve carrier vetting with a compliance department. A 2–10 person brokerage doesn't have one — the same coordinator who covers loads is the one deciding whether an unfamiliar MC is safe to book. Keelway is built for that shape of team: vetting runs automatically in the background of the inbox you already work in, and the plan is $799/mo flat with unlimited users, no setup fee, and a 30-day full-product trial. Implementation takes under one business day — importing carriers, customers, and loads via CSV or API.

Flags don't silently delete anything. A flagged carrier moves to a separate triage queue where the coordinator can review the reasons, override with one click and a note, or decline and log why. Every flag and override lands in the carrier's permanent record, so a small team builds an auditable vetting history without hiring for it. Overrides also feed the calibration model — most brokerages stabilize their false-positive rate under 2% within 30 days.

Where the carrier packet fits

Keelway deliberately covers the pre-packet step. The traditional carrier packet bundles two different jobs: regulatory verification (authority, insurance, safety data) and paperwork collection (W-9, signed carrier agreement, certificates). Keelway automates the first job completely — the trust score covers the regulatory verification components of the packet at the email-triage stage, using FMCSA data pulled in real time. The paperwork step then runs through your existing packet process, but only for carriers who already passed verification.

That ordering matters more than it sounds. Sending a packet is an invitation — it tells the carrier you intend to work with them. Vetting first means you never extend that invitation to a double-broker, and your packet volume drops to the carriers worth the paperwork. For the manual version of this workflow, see the carrier vetting guide; for one-off checks, the free FMCSA MC/DOT lookup runs the same authority check with no signup.

Onboarding vetting is one surface of the trust layer

The engine behind this page is Keelway's carrier trust score — the same 0–100 composite that ranks replies inside carrier email automation. Brokerages that want a deeper fraud layer add Fraud Shield ($199/mo flat), which layers Highway identity data, chameleon-carrier patterns, and the cross-brokerage signal network onto every inbound email, scored server-side in under 600 ms. And because Keelway is Gmail-native, none of it requires changing your TMS — though if you want the vetted carrier written straight into a load record, the Keelway TMS ships the whole loop on the same flat plan.