Some twenty years since its establishment under the original moniker of FIX Protocol, the non-profit financial trading industry standards organization, which this year underwent a rebranding exercise in order that it may continue its modernization process, has today announced that it has concluded an organizational restructure.
Four months have now passed since FIX Protocol was rebranded to FIX Trading Community as a result of its need to diversify and expand into different areas of issuing standards for messaging, and the organization’s involvement in post-trade messaging guidelines, leading to a series of new committees having now been formed in order to optimize the structure of the organization.
Courtney Doyle McGuinn,
Operations Director,
FIX Trading Community
According to FIX Trading Community, the completion of this particular exercise has channeled the resources of the organization into structured units in order to address the technical, business and regulatory issues impacting multi-asset trading across the global financial markets.
FIX Trading Community has been involved in mediation between institutional industry participants and Senate committees with regard to the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act during the course of this year, which, among other factors, has demonstrated to the organization that there is an industry-wide requirement for increased use of standards, including the FIX Protocol, to deliver operational efficiency, increased transparency, and aims to reduce cost and risk for all market participants.
The new committees which have been established are:
Listed Products & Exchanges Committee. This committee's remit is to maintain the current FIX standards with respect to equities and listed derivatives, and overseeing the development and promotion of best practices for trading these products.
OTC Products Committee. The rationale behind the establishment of this department is to oversee standards development and strategic considerations, given many of the common and overlapping initiatives of the OTC derivatives, fixed income and foreign exchange markets. With Dodd-Frank and other regulatory changes involving multi-asset classes, leveraging the expertise of the three areas together is a practical step to address required developments. FIX Trading Community released a series of industry standards earlier this year following a series of Swap Execution Facility approvals in the United States.
Global Buy-Side Committee. This committee was formed to deliver a focal point for the global buy-side community where informed debate around the business processes, messaging and technical standards affecting the community can take place, and best practices, solutions and recommendations can be formulated and delivered. This builds on the success of recent regional buy-side initiatives.
Global Member Services Committee. Managing the relationship with FIX Trading Community members and the wider industry. This includes promoting and growing membership, managing educational events, briefings and conferences, media relations and communication of FIX Trading Community's activities and services.
GSC Strategy Committee. Developing strategic plans focused on the future of the FIX standards, the organization and electronic trading in general is the task of this particular committee.
The Global Steering Committee (GSC) is still responsible for overseeing the FIX Trading Community by effectively managing the organization's ongoing needs at both the strategic and operational level. The group includes representation from the leaders of each of FIX Trading Community's four regional committees (Americas, Asia-Pacific, EMEA, Japan) as well as leadership of the Global Technical Committee and the newly-formed committees mentioned above.
These regional committees recently held their annual meeting to review accomplishments from the past year and discussed goals for the FIX Trading Community in 2014, which include establishing and promoting the vision for the next generation of the protocol, publishing further release candidates of FIX for High Performance, distributing best practices for Transaction Cost Analysis, etc.
Courtney Doyle McGuinn, FIX Trading Community's Operations Director today made a statement on behalf of the organization that: "The organization went through a restructuring exercise about a decade ago and with FIX about to embark on its 20 year anniversary, it seemed the right time to realign. With so much change affecting the financial markets, it is absolutely imperative that the FIX Trading Community stay relevant across the asset classes, across the trading lifecycle and throughout the globe."
