Bank of America introduced ERMA, an early computerized electronic check-processing system, during the 1950s. ERMA stands for Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting, and it was developed to handle the rapidly increasing volume of bank cheques.
The system was created with Stanford Research Institute and General Electric. It used magnetic-ink character recognition, allowing machines to read account information printed in a standardized form at the bottom of cheques.
ERMA automated bookkeeping tasks that had previously required large numbers of clerks. It could maintain customer account records, post transactions, and support cheque processing at a scale that manual systems struggled to match.
The project helped popularize MICR technology, which became an international standard for machine-readable cheque data. ERMA is often remembered as an early milestone in banking automation, not as a general-purpose consumer computer or an online-banking service.