The payments industry likes to measure progress in milliseconds. Real-time rails, stablecoins, and instant settlement dominate the conversation. But for many businesses, the biggest source of friction is everything that surrounds the payment itself.
For J.P. Morgan Payments, that friction still arrives in envelopes.
In 2025 alone, the bank processed roughly 480 million checks and payment documents through its lockbox network. Behind every payment was a mix of invoices, remittance slips, handwritten notes, folded documents, staples, and countless formatting variations that traditionally required human intervention.
Before automation, processing that volume meant employees performed roughly 13 billion manual keystrokes every year.
Teaching AI to handle the messy middle
Rather than trying to eliminate checks that still account for about 25% to 26% of outgoing and incoming B2B payments in the U.S., J.P. Morgan Payments focused on eliminating the work they create.
The bank rebuilt its lockbox platform in 2020 with AI embedded into its core workflows. Once payment documents are scanned, computer vision and machine learning extract payment information, validate business rules, and review documents automatically. More recently, large language models have been added to support increasingly complex exception handling.
J.P. Morgan Payments’ tech systems can now process more than 4,000 envelope and document permutations, while the AI processing platform now achieves over 99.999% accuracy in document data extraction and business rule validation.
In 2025, the bank extended that automation into the physical world, deploying robotics at its lockbox facility that open envelopes, extract checks and invoices, unfold documents, organize paperwork, and prepare everything for AI processing.
“By investing in robotic and AI technology to improve our lockbox operations, we are automating the most labor-intensive tasks of the process, freeing our team to focus on more complex, higher-value decision-making,” said Michelle Conklin, Head of Receivables and Public Sector at J.P. Morgan Payments.
The robots were initially deployed at a single site for testing. Following a successful first deployment, they are being further refined and will return later this summer as part of the bank’s phased deployment approach.
Why this matters beyond paper
Checks remain a meaningful part of the U.S. payments ecosystem, particularly in B2B receivables. The real operational challenge is the manual work required to convert paper into usable financial data.
For treasury and finance teams, settlement is only one step in the process. Payments still need to be matched to invoices, reconciled against receivables, and reflected accurately in accounting systems before they become operationally useful.
“Moving dollars is only half the story,” according to Conklin. The other half is ensuring payment data is accurate and actionable the moment funds arrive, helping businesses reduce days sales outstanding (DSO), improve working capital, and accelerate reconciliation.
When payments become information problems
Checks have survived for so long because businesses built decades of workflows around them.
What’s changing now are the economics of processing. AI has reached a point where it can interpret thousands of document variations, extract meaning from unstructured data, and automate work that previously required human intervention.
Going forward, some of the biggest productivity gains across financial services may come from making legacy payment workflows machine-readable.
Read the deeper dive here.
