The magnetic printing must of course be associated with a reader that will be able to read according to the magnetic intensity of the toner or ink through a car windshield for a vignette for example, or an invisible magnetic character or fluorescent under a UV lamp. The MICR thus secures the document when it is printed and participates with other techniques such as micro-characters, digital watermarks, barcodes, guilloches, invisible or fluorescent inks, secure papers … in the fight against falsification of a paper document.īeyond MICR characters, magnetic printing must also be indestructible, unless it destroys the substrate, and the toner or ink must not be copiable to ensure its authenticity, as for stamps for example. WHAT ARE THE MICR APPLICATIONS AND OTHER MAGNETIC PRINTING TECHNIQUES FOR SECURING A PRINTED DOCUMENT? The 14 characters of the E13B, for example, form a single frequency during the magnetic reading of the character In other countries, such as Germany, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has been chosen for check processing. Today it is used in Spain, France, Latin America and some African countries. The CMC7 has been developed in France to improve the quality of reading. It is used in the United States, Canada, England, Australia, Mexico and some countries (Japan, Hong Kong, China, India). The E13B was developed by Stanford University and Bank of America. These characters MICR are found at the bottom of the check and must respect different coding systems, the CMC7 or E13B according to the country in which they are printed. It was in 1950 that the banking industry began using magnetic characters to improve the reading process and thus the processing of checks. Another advantage is to avoid the potential risks of malfeasance, as well as certain manipulations, such as changing media whenever it is appropriate to print checks of a particular type or associated with different bank accounts.
One of the main advantages of this mode of printing is that it allows you to produce at a lower cost, because no special paper is required.
The MICR is also generally used to print any valuable document such as checks, gift vouchers, lunch vouchers or negotiable documents such as remittance vouchers or loan bonds, for example. MICR printing is therefore a global process requiring the creation of these fonts and characters and therefore a knowledge of the upstream of printing for the composition of a secure document. This requires special printers with special fonts and magnetic ink or toner to produce characters that can be read by electronic data processing systems, such as those used for bank checks. MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition) printing consists in printing characters that will require magnetic reading and are often used for printing checks. – First point, what does the MICR stands for and what is it for?