What is MICR Full Form?

Magnetic Ink Character Recognition Code, or MICR code for short, is a character recognition technology primarily used by the banking industry to speed up the processing and clearing of checks and other documents. MICR coding, called the MICR line, is found at the end of checks and other receipts and typically includes the document type identifier, sort code, bank account number, check number, and check amount (usually added after a check is presented for payment ). and a control flag. The format of the sort code and bank account number is country-specific.

The technology allows MICR readers to scan and read the information directly on a data collection device. Unlike barcodes and similar technologies, MICR characters are easily read by humans. MICR encoded documents can be processed much faster and more accurately than traditional OCR encoded documents.

There are two main MICR fonts in use: E-13B and CMC-7. There is no particular international agreement on which countries use which font. In practice this does not pose any particular problem as checks and other receipts generally do not leave any particular jurisdiction.

The E-13B font has been adopted as an international standard in ISO 1004-1:2013 and is the standard in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, the United States, Central America and much of Asia, among other countries. .

Israel is the only country that can use both sources simultaneously, although the practice makes the system considerably less efficient. This situation is due to the fact that the Israelis adopted the CMC-7 while the Palestinians chose the E-13B.

In the banking and check printing industry, the E-13B MICR line is also commonly known as the TOAD line. This reference results from the 4 characters: Transit, Onus, Amount and Dash. [citation needed] Compared to CMC-7, some E-13B character pairs (particularly 2 and 5) can produce relatively similar results when scanned magnetically; However, if the magnetic reading fails, the E-13B works with optical character recognition as an alternative.

The E-13B repertoire can be represented in Unicode (see below). Before Unicode, it could be encoded according to ISO 2033:1983, which encodes digits in their usual ASCII positions, transit as 0x3A, for us as 0x3C, quantity as 0x3B, and dash as 0x3D. For EBCDIC, IBM code page 1001 encodes the digits in their usual EBCDIC positions, transit as 0xDB, on us as 0xEB, quantity as 0xCB, and hyphen as 0xFB.

IBM code page 1032 extends code page 1001 by providing alternate encodings for the transit at 0x5C, 0x7A, and 0xC1, our own at 0x4C, 0x61, and 0xC3, the set at 0x5B, 0x5E, and 0xC2, and the hyphen at 0x60, 0x7E, and 0xC4 adds , plus a zero-width space at 0x5A. These alternate representations were added for interoperability with Siemens and Océ printers.

CMC-7 contains 10 digits, 26 uppercase letters and 5 control characters: S I (internal),[citation required] S II (terminator),[citation required] S III (quantity),[citation required] S IV (an unused character) and S V (routing). [citation required]

CMC-7 is in barcode format, with each character having two different sized spaces at different locations and different patterns between them to minimize any possibility of character confusion during magnetic reading; However, these bars are too close together and narrow to be reliably detected at typical scan resolution using optical scanning. CMC-7 can also produce superficially successful but false scans of inverted MICR lines.