Articles
MICR Printing Technology: Automating Securities Check Issuance
June 9, 2009
•White Paper: MICR Printing Technology: Automating Securities Check Issuance
By Source Technologies
A fundamental check printing technology is Magnetic Ink Character Recognition, or MICR. MICR is a special kind of optical character recognition (OCR) technology that was adopted mainly by the U.S. banking industry to facilitate the processing of checks. In addition to a specialized font, MICR characters are printed using ink that has magnetic properties, allowing the MICR characters to be read by high-speed check reading/sorting equipment used by financial institutions to process checks and other negotiable documents. Almost all US and UK checks include MICR characters, known as E-13B.
Checks travel through a country's check clearing system, typically passing through machines called MICR reader/sorters. High-speed reader/sorters use a device that functions similar to the head of an audio tape recorder. As the check passes through the machine, the reader/sorter sends a magnetic charge to the check, which allows the reader sorter to read the information contained within the MICR line very quickly; checks pass through reader/sorters at speeds of up to 20mph.
The combination of specially-designed characters and magnetic ink make the error rate for scanning checks significantly smaller than other optical character recognition applications. Reader accuracy is even higher than when processed by hand, and has made the processing of billions of checks annually an extremely efficient process.
Click Here To Download:•White Paper: MICR Printing Technology: Automating Securities Check Issuance
