New Check Stock Design Coming to StockChecks

In ordering to meet the forthcoming new, more stringently enforced American National Standards Institute (ANSI) check standards, StockChecks is implementing a new check stock design. The new check design will fully comply with the revised ANSI enforcement.

As our current inventory of check stock is depleted, we will begin to implement this new design. On the new design, you will be able to see that the lower warning band has been thinned and raised, allowing the full 5/8” Clearband at the bottom of your check. That said, all current checks are still compliant, and the new design is taken as a proactive approach.

In 2010, the standards were changed on business size checks to remove all printing over 0.3 Print Contrast Signal (PCS) from the 5/8” Clearband. Personal checks were still allowed to have a 0.450” Clearband. Due to this, the language in the current standard was clarified so that it was clear where the borders/warning bands are allowed, are not allowed, and to specifically disallow borders/warning bands above the MICR print band in the MICR clear band on payroll and business size checks.

• Borders and warning bands above 0.3 PCS were not supposed to be in the 5/8” Clearband.  Most of the borders/warning bands on the Wilmer checks are 0.6 PCS or higher.
• Almost all toner has magnetic properties, so if customers are imprinting their checks using laser printers there is a strong chance of their MICR rejecting if the customers imprinting falls into the 5/8” MICR Clearband.  Having the borders/warning bands a little higher than 5/8” allows the customer to have a visual line that keeps their imprinting above the 5/8” MICR Clearband.
• The 0.6 PCS borders/warning bands in the MICR were triggering exceptions in the banks’ image quality software because they show up as a black line in images.
• For this same reason they tend to reject at ATMs and point of sale machines.
• Changing the borders/warning bands location will allow greater acceptance and interoperability of these checks and push our customers towards compliance with the standards.

Stay tuned for additional updates regarding our check design and, should you have any questions on these updates, we welcome you to give our customer service department a call at 888-391-7898.