The Check Clearing Act for the 21st Century (Check 21), enacted by US Congress in 2003, intended to make the US payment system more efficient by encouraging the financial services industry to adopt image based check technologies and electronic processing capabilities (image exchange).  While the payments system and the consumer population has realized many efficiencies from check image technology as a whole, the electronification of checks has exacerbated particular operational issues which impedes the realization of the full value of image adoption. 

One of the issues hindering the full efficiencies of image exchange is the lack of common understanding of the processing requirements for populating the 25 record fields from different check stock MICR formats.  Read more about i3G's best practices proposals by downloading our industry document.