1. A phase angle based magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) system, comprising: a segmentation system for segmenting inputted MICR data into sets of temporal data for different inputted characters; a Fourier system for generating a set of phase angle components from the temporal data for each segmented character; and a matching system for comparing the set of phase angle components with each of a set of reference waveforms to determine an identity of the inputted character.