The chart below shows by country how financial account information is
printed on the face of checks in order to facilitate automated clearing
of payments. Most countries, such as the US, Canada, UK, Australia,
India and many more use the MICR-E13B font style, which must be printed
in MICR ink to meet high-speed processing requirements. Other countries
such as Bazil, France, Spain, Japan and more use the MICR-CMC7 font, which
must also be printed in MICR ink as well to follow processing
regulations. Two alternative methods are to use OCR-A and -B fonts for
data processing of financial documents that rely on optical scanning,
but these are rarely used for check applications. Each year billions
of checks are produced worldwide using MICR readable characters.