History
Before the mid 1940s, cheques were processed manually using either 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 Computer Laboratory had developed the first automated system to process cheques using MICR. The same team also developed the E13B MICR font.
The CMC-7 font was developed in France by Groupe Bull in 1957.
In 1958, the American Bankers Association (ABA) adopted E13B font as the MICR standard for negotiable documents in the United States. By the end of 1959, the first cheques had been printed using MICR. The 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.
MICR technology has been adopted in many countries, with some variations. In 1963, ANSI adopted the ABA’s E13B font as the American standard for MICR printing. Although compliance with MICR standards is voluntary in the United States, their use with cheques is almost universal. E13B MICR has also been standardized as ISO 1004:1995. The E13B font was adopted as the standard in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and other countries. The CMC-7 font was adopted as the MICR standard in 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, or E-13B, is also used to encode information in other applications like: sales promotions, coupons, credit cards, airline tickets, insurance premium receipts, deposit tickets, and more.
Read more about this topic: Magnetic Ink Character Recognition
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