Magnetic ink character recognition

There are two major MICR fonts in use: E-13B and CMC-7. There is no particular international agreement on which countries use which font.[1] In practice, this does not create particular problems as cheques and other vouchers do not usually flow out of a particular jurisdiction.

The MICR E-13B font has been adopted as the international standard in ISO 1004:1995, and is the standard in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, as well as Central America and much of Asia, besides other countries.[1]

The CMC-7 font is widely used in Europe, including France and Italy, and South America, including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, besides other countries.

Israel is the only country that can use both fonts simultaneously, though the practice makes the system significantly less efficient. This situation is the product of the Israelis adopting CMC7, while the Palestinians opted for E13B.[1]

MICR characters are printed on documents in one of the two MICR fonts, using magnetizable (commonly known as magnetic) ink or toner, usually containing iron oxide. In scanning, the document is passed through a MICR reader, which performs two functions: magnetization of the ink, and detection of the characters. The characters are read by a MICR reader head, a device similar to the playback head of a tape recorder. As each character passes over the head, it produces a unique waveform that can be easily identified by the system.

The use of MICR allows the characters to be read reliably even if they have been overprinted or obscured by other marks, such as cancellation stamps and the signature. The error rate for the magnetic scanning of a typical cheque is smaller than with optical character recognition systems. For well printed MICR documents, the "can't read" rate is usually less than 1%,[1] while the substitution rate (misread rate) is in the order of 1 per 100,000 characters. Rejected items are hand processed.

MICR readers are the primary tool for cheque sorting and are utilised across the cheque distribution network at multiple stages. For example, a merchant will use a MICR reader to sort cheques by bank and send the sorted cheques to a clearing house for redistribution to those banks. Upon receipt, the banks perform another MICR sort to determine which customer's account is charged and to which branch the cheque should be sent on its way back to the customer. However, many banks no longer offer this last step of returning the cheque to the customer. Instead, cheques are scanned and stored digitally. Sorting of cheques is done as per the geographical coverage of banks in a nation. [2]

OCR and MICR characters have been included in the Unicode Standard since at least version 1.1 (June 1993). Since the Unicode Character Database only tracks characters starting with version 1.1, they may also have been present in Unicode 1.0 or 1.0.1.[3]

The Unicode block that includes OCR and MICR characters is called Optical Character Recognition and covers U+2440–U+245F. Of the characters in this block, four are from the MICR E-13B font:

• U+2446 ⑆ OCR BRANCH BANK IDENTIFICATION
• U+2447 ⑇ OCR AMOUNT OF CHECK
• U+2448 ⑈ OCR DASH (corrected alias MICR ON US SYMBOL)[4]
• U+2449 ⑉ OCR CUSTOMER ACCOUNT NUMBER (corrected alias MICR DASH SYMBOL)[4]

The names of the latter two characters were inadvertently switched when they were named in ISO/IEC 10646:1993,[5] and they have been assigned accurate names as formal aliases.[4] Per the Unicode Stability Policy, the existing names remain, allowing their use as stable identifiers.[6] Additionally, all four characters have informative (non-formal) aliases in the Unicode charts: "transit", "amount", "on us", and "dash" respectively.

Prior to Unicode, these symbols had been encoded by the ISO-IR-98 encoding defined by ISO 2033:1983, in which they were simply named SYMBOL ONE through SYMBOL FOUR. They were encoded immediately following the digits, which were encoded at their ASCII locations.[7] Although ISO 2033 also specifies encoding for OCR-A and OCR-B, its encoding for E-13B is known simply as ISO_2033-1983 by the IANA.[8]

Before the mid-1940s, cheques were processed manually using the Sort-A-Matic or Top Tab Key method. The processing and clearance of cheques was very time-consuming and was a significant cost in cheque clearance and bank operations. As the number of cheques increased, ways were sought for automating the process. Standards were developed to ensure uniformity in financial institutions. By the mid-1950s, the Stanford Research Institute and General Electric[9] Computer Laboratory had developed the first automated system to process cheques using MICR. The same team also developed the E13B MICR font. "E" refers to the font being the fifth considered, and "B" to the fact that it was the second version. The "13" refers to the 0.013 inch character grid.

The trial of MICR E13B font was shown to the American Bankers Association (ABA) in July 1956, which adopted it in 1958 as the MICR standard for negotiable documents in the United States. ABA adopted MICR as its standard because machines could read MICR accurately, and MICR could be printed using existing technology. In addition, MICR remained machine readable, even through overstamping, marking, mutilation and more. The first cheques using MICR were printed by the end of 1959. Although compliance with MICR standards was voluntary in the United States, it had been almost universally adopted in the United States by 1963.[10] In 1963, ANSI adopted the ABA's E13B font as the American standard for MICR printing,[11] and E13B was also standardized as ISO 1004:1995.

Other countries set their own standards, though the MICR readers and most other equipment were US manufactured. MICR technology has been adopted in many countries, with some variations. The E13B font was adopted as the standard in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and many other countries. In Australia, the system is managed by the Australian Payments Network.

The CMC-7 font was developed in France by Groupe Bull in 1957. It was adopted as the MICR standard in Argentina, France, Italy, and some other European countries.

In the 1960s, the MICR fonts became a symbol of modernity or futurism, leading to the creation of lookalike "computer" typefaces that imitated the appearance of the MICR fonts, which unlike real MICR fonts, had a full character set.

MICR E-13B is also used to encode information in other applications, such as sales promotions, coupons, credit cards, airline tickets, insurance premium receipts, deposit tickets, and more. E13b is the version specifically developed for offset litho printing. There was a subtly different version for letterpress, called E13a. Also, there was a rival system named 'Fred' (Figure Reading Electronic Device) which used figures that looked more conventional.

• Cheque truncation system
• Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting
• OCR-A
• OCR-B
• Westminster (typeface)

• MICR Basics Handbook, Troy Group, Inc.
• Which Is Better, E13B or CMC7?
• Easy experiment to detect magnetic ink in bank notes, (in French)