- Most payment discussions assume the biggest challenge is moving money from Point A to Point B. What if the bigger bottleneck is actually the operational noise surrounding the payment?
- Investing in checks sounds like a step backward, but J.P. Morgan Payments is doing exactly that – because paper checks still create the greatest operational friction in the modern financial system.
The dominant narrative in payments is real-time payments, stablecoins, instant payment rails, always-on cash flow, and near-seamless cross-border movement. But speed at the point of settlement doesn’t solve what happens before and after money moves.
One of the world’s largest payments businesses processed more than 130 million checks in 2025. Behind every check was a chain of envelopes, remittance slips, invoices, inconsistent formats, and manual reconciliation.
That’s the gap J.P. Morgan Payments is targeting with its multi-year effort, using AI, robotics, computer vision, and large language models to digitize and automate its lockbox operations. The project is about modernizing one of the most manual information-processing systems still embedded inside corporate payments.
“Checks are still a meaningful part of the U.S. payments landscape,” says Michelle Conklin, Head of Receivables and Public Sector at J.P. Morgan Payments. “The challenge is often not the check payment itself, but all of the manual work that comes with it: opening mail, extracting checks and remittance documents, capturing data, validating information, and handling exceptions.”
“That is where we see a real opportunity to drive value,” she notes. “When we automate those steps with AI and robotics, we can scale more easily and make the process faster and more accurate. This is a reminder that innovation in payments is not only about faster settlement. It is also about removing friction from the end-to-end process, such as what we’re advancing in the lockbox space.”
When AI finally became good enough for the messy middle
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Facts Only
* J.P. Morgan Payments aims to use AI, robotics, computer vision, and large language models to digitize and automate lockbox operations.
* The business processed more than 130 million checks in 2025.
* Manual processes behind checks include handling envelopes, remittance slips, invoices, inconsistent formats, and manual reconciliation.
* A challenge in payments is the operational noise surrounding money movement, not just the point-to-point transfer.
* Michelle Conklin, Head of Receivables and Public Sector at J.P. Morgan Payments, states that challenges involve opening mail, extracting documents, capturing data, validating information, and handling exceptions related to checks.
Executive Summary
The discussion around payments often focuses on the movement of funds between points, such as moving money from Point A to Point B. However, a specific area of friction is identified in the operational processes surrounding payment settlement. Paper checks remain a significant source of this operational friction, involving complex manual steps like handling envelopes, remittance slips, invoices, and reconciliation.
J.P. Morgan Payments is targeting this operational bottleneck by employing AI, robotics, computer vision, and large language models to automate lockbox operations. This effort is aimed at digitizing and automating the manual information-processing systems embedded in corporate payments, rather than solely focusing on faster settlement rails like real-time payments or stablecoins.
Michelle Conklin of J.P. Morgan Payments states that the challenge often lies not in the check payment itself, but in the surrounding manual work: opening mail, extracting data, validating information, and handling exceptions. The opportunity lies in automating these steps to increase accuracy, speed, and scalability beyond just accelerating settlement timelines.
Full Take
The narrative pivots from optimizing the speed of transactional movement to addressing systemic friction within legacy operational processes. The core implication is that advanced financial innovation must account for the full lifecycle of a transaction, including the often invisible manual overhead, rather than focusing solely on high-speed settlement infrastructure. This frames payment system evolution not just as a technological race toward instantaneity but as an integration challenge requiring process overhaul.
The focus on checking and lockbox automation suggests a pattern where entrenched physical or procedural methods create inertia that resists purely digital solutions. The opportunity highlighted is shifting the innovation benchmark from speed (real-time payments) to fidelity and efficiency in data handling across end-to-end workflows. This implies a structural reality where operational complexity acts as a non-trivial barrier, suggesting that future competitive advantages will reside in mastering the "messy middle" of financial operations rather than just the instantaneous movement of assets.
What assumptions are being made about the relationship between speed and friction? If speed is prioritized above all else, does the resulting system simply accelerate the handling of more complex manual exceptions or shifts the burden elsewhere? What are the long-term consequences for institutional trust if automation successfully eliminates traditional roles embedded in these manual data-processing chains?
Sentinel — Human
The text reads like a well-structured industry commentary, effectively using a specific company quote to pivot the discussion toward overlooked operational friction in the payments system.