For decades, wire transfers have been the quickest, most reliable, most expensive and dumbest way to make payments. Using wires isn't dumb. It's the wires themselves that are, with their tiny data fields and inability to convey more than bare-bones information about payments. "We get high-value wires to settle multiple invoices," reports Christy Barwick, a Microsoft senior manager in corporate finance, "but the information we need to auto-post or apply the cash is not there. Even when the payer sends it, it gets cut off by the short data field.

"It means a lot of manual work for cash application," Barwick says. "We'd love to see a solution that delivers full remittance detail in structured fields so that the process can be automated straight through."

That solution is coming. The two wire clearing networks, FedWire and Chips, now have the rails to carry the freight of full remittance detail. Starting in November, banks will be required to show that they are able to receive the full remittance detail that arrives with wires. Now it's up to banks and corporations to load and unload the freight.