Morgan automates payments paperwork

The payments industry often measures progress in milliseconds, with real-time rails and instant settlement dominating the conversation. However, for many businesses, the biggest source of friction is the paperwork surrounding payments. For J.P. Morgan Payments, this friction still arrives in envelopes, with the bank processing roughly 480 million checks and payment documents through its lockbox network in 2025 alone.

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 this volume meant employees performed roughly 13 billion manual keystrokes every year.

J.P. Morgan Payments focused on eliminating the work created by checks, which still account for about 25% to 26% of outgoing and incoming B2B payments in the U.S.

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.

Related: Firms seek next best customer move

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 achieves over 99.999% accuracy in document data extraction and business rule validation.

In 2025, the bank extended 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. According to Michelle Conklin, Head of Receivables and Public Sector at J.P. Morgan Payments, “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.”

Conklin notes that checks remain a meaningful part of the U.S. payments ecosystem, particularly in B2B receivables, with the real operational challenge being the manual work required to convert paper into usable financial data.

For treasury and finance teams, settlement is only one step in the process, as payments still need to be matched to invoices, reconciled against receivables, and reflected accurately in accounting systems before they become operationally useful. As Conklin noted, “Moving dollars is only half the story,” with the other half being ensuring payment data is accurate and actionable the moment funds arrive.

Checks have survived for so long because businesses built decades of workflows around them. However, what’s changing now are the economics of processing, with AI reaching a point where it can interpret thousands of document variations, extract meaning from unstructured data, and automate work that previously required human intervention.

Related: User Account Blocked by Social Media Platform

Going forward, some of the biggest productivity gains across financial services may come from making legacy payment workflows machine-readable. This shift could have significant implications for businesses, allowing them to reduce days sales outstanding, improve working capital, and accelerate reconciliation.

The use of AI and robotics in payment processing is a notable example of how technology can be used to improve the efficiency of legacy systems.

As the payments industry continues to evolve, it’s likely that we’ll see more focus on automating the paperwork surrounding payments, rather than just the payment itself.

Businesses can unlock significant efficiency gains and improve their overall financial operations by automating paperwork.