J.P. Morgan cuts 13 billion keystrokes through automation
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.
The bank processed roughly 480 million checks and payment documents through its lockbox network in 2025. Behind each payment was a mix of invoices, remittance slips, handwritten notes, folded documents, staples, and formatting variations that required human intervention. Before automation, that workload meant employees performed roughly 13 billion manual keystrokes every year.
Checks still account for about 25% to 26% of outgoing and incoming B2B payments in the U.S. Rather than trying to eliminate them, the bank focused on eliminating the work they create.
Rebuilding lockbox with AI at the core
J.P. Morgan Payments rebuilt its lockbox platform in 2020 with AI embedded into its core workflows. When payment documents are scanned, computer vision and machine learning extract payment information, validate business rules, and review documents automatically. Large language models have been added more recently to handle increasingly complex exceptions.
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The bank’s technology can now process more than 4,000 envelope and document permutations. The AI platform achieves over 99.999% accuracy in document data extraction and business rule validation. That level of precision matters because every misread creates downstream work for treasury teams.
For treasury and finance teams, settlement is only one step. Payments still need to be matched to invoices, reconciled against receivables, and reflected accurately in accounting systems before they become operationally useful. The real challenge has always been converting paper into usable financial data. By embedding AI at the point of entry, the bank turned a document processing bottleneck into an information pipeline — structured data arrives alongside the funds, not as a separate reconciliation task that follows days or weeks later. This changes the economics of paper-based payments in ways that faster settlement alone cannot address.
Robots take over the physical work
In 2025, the bank extended automation into the physical world. Robotics deployed at its lockbox facility now open envelopes, extract checks and invoices, unfold documents, organize paperwork, and prepare everything for AI processing. The robots were initially tested at a single site. Following a successful deployment, they are being further refined and will return later this summer as part of the phased rollout.
These machines handle tasks previously done by hand — opening each envelope, removing staples, unfolding paper, and sorting documents for the AI. At a volume of 480 million items per year, those seconds of manual work per item added up to significant labor costs.
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“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 accuracy and productivity figures are based on the bank’s own measurements. The trend is consistent across financial services: AI can now interpret thousands of document variations and automate work that previously required human intervention.
Checks have survived for so long because businesses built decades of workflows around them. What is changing now are the economics of processing. Some of the biggest productivity gains across financial services going forward may come from making legacy payment workflows machine-readable.
“Moving dollars is only half the story,” Conklin said. The other half is ensuring payment data is accurate and actionable the moment funds arrive, helping businesses reduce days sales outstanding, improve working capital, and accelerate reconciliation.
