FIX Trading Community Opens Process for Technical Standards

FIX Trading Community, the non-profit standardization body for the global financial industry, announced that it has initiated an open process for technical standards specifically targeting software developers.

The purpose of the process is to improve the performance of trading venues, lower their costs and make them more reliable, FIX said in a statement. The process will be hosted on the open-source platform GitHub, a data repository with millions of users from the software development industry.

Markets need a high-performance interface for order routing and market data

Jim Northey, Co-Chair, Global Technical Committee, FIX Trading Community, said: “We realised that while standard FIX is highly performant, there is an additional need for a high performance interface for order routing and market data to support the modern trading venue. Our goal is to provide a FIX based standard, including an open source reference implementation, that fully meets the requirements of the modern Execution venue. The Simple Binary Encoding and the new FIX Performance Session Protocol, both of which build upon the collective experience of the market place, are first steps in meeting this need."

This process will be the third in a series of projects launched by FIX Trading Community on GitHub. The first, FIXTradingCommunity/fix-simple-binary-encoding, which comprises of specifications for a FIX standard on binary messaging. The second, FIXTradingCommunity/fixp-specification, which consists of specifications for a protocol developed by FIX for messaging between counterparties.