Why JPMorganChase is deploying robots in its lockbox

• Key insights: JPMorganChase is updating its lockbox business with AI-powered automation and robotics as part of the $19.8 billion the New York-based bank has earmarked for technology investment. 
• What's at stake: Deploying robotics and automation in its lockbox operations is less about reducing labor costs and more about margin defense and maintaining operating deposits and treasury relationships.
• Forward look: The robots, which can open envelopes, remove staples, and scan documents, are being used in Chicago and will eventually be deployed at the bank's six other wholly owned lockbox locations across the U.S. 

For decades, checks have been lauded as a dying payment method, but that isn't stopping JPMorganChase from investing in its lockbox business through AI-powered automation and robotics.

Lockboxes are services provided by banks to corporate clients that collect and process checks on their behalf. The business's clients send check payments to a post office box managed by the bank, and the bank processes and deposits those payments into the corporation's account.

Robotics and artificial intelligence are a key part of JPMorganChase's lockbox modernization strategy. The New York-based bank in 2025 deployed robotics automation into its lockbox location in Chicago, and is preparing to deploy them at the bank's six other wholly owned lockbox locations across the U.S. The robots, which were developed with Ripcord, a Silicon Valley-based document intelligence company, have the dexterity of the human arm and can open envelopes, remove and unfold the contents, separate pages, remove staples, and scan documents. It can also detect nine different types of paper folds and 4,000 envelope combinations.

The bank contends checks remain a critical part of how many businesses operate. In 2025 alone, J.P. Morgan Payments processed more than 130 million checks, each accompanied by invoices and remittance information that needed to be captured and matched correctly, according to Michelle Conklin, head of receivables and public sector, J.P. Morgan Payments.

"That scale is why we continue to invest in our lockbox operations," Conklin told American Banker. "By applying AI and robotics to the most manual parts of this process, we are making check processing faster and more accurate, while helping our teams focus on the exceptions and decisions that require human expertise."

The initiative is part of the $19.8 billion the $5 trillion-asset bank has earmarked for technology investment, and comes as large corporates with fragmented counterparties or complex remittance data in industries such as healthcare, insurance, utilities, government, property management, and construction, show continued demand for check processing.

"The paper check is extraordinarily persistent, and outside of fraud concerns many businesses aren't feeling incentivized or compelled to switch," Benjamin Nestor, a strategic advisor covering commercial banking and payments at Datos Insights, told American Banker.

Check collection is a shrinking business, to be sure. Last year, the Federal Reserve collected about 2.8 billion commercial checks — about half of the 5.6 billion checks it collected a decade earlier in 2015. Ten years before that, the Fed collected 12.2 billion checks.

Read more:

• These are the Top Performing Banks of 2026 in four asset tiers
• New York bank regulator says vendor flaw hit its firms
• The best credit unions to work for in 2026

• Tokenized deposits are here. Banks need to manage the risks.

Still, corporate treasurers are prioritizing receivables and collections to improve working capital, especially in a high-interest rate environment, said Colin Kerr, head of banking and payments at Celent, who noted about 27% of U.S. corporate banking respondents in the 2026 Celent Dimensions Survey ranked receivables management as a top-3 priority.
"For corporates, if they must still be paid by check, the requirement is for banks to process, match, and reconcile those as quickly and accurately as possible," Kerr told American Banker. "AI has been used extensively in check receivables for some years, so the use of additional robotics may yield some additional value."

It takes about 13 billion keystrokes annually to process the information on checks and remittance documents, according to JPMorganChase. Thanks to AI, that's largely automated.

But, using AI and robotics to automate check processing in its lockbox operations is less about reducing labor costs and more about margin defense for unit economics and maintaining the operating deposits and treasury relationships that check processing anchors, according to Nestor.

"Inside a receivables operation, automating the most labor-intensive steps takes out a real share of the cost base," Nestor said. "However, measured against a large bank's total expenses, it's not enormously significant.

"It's really a scale story since the fixed cost of building this only works if you're running enormous volume across it, which means the largest processors can reach a unit cost [that] sub-scale providers can't match," Nestor said.

That is accelerating consolidation in the industry, Nestor said, and automation is helping banks like JPMorganChase absorb competitors' books as smaller players exit the industry.

"As a result, the market is consolidating so that you end up with a much larger share of a meaningfully smaller market, which depends on winning volume away from competitors than on the labor it saves," Nestor said.