FIX Initiatives
The table below provides background on the various initiatives underway within the FIX Trading Community™. If you are interested in learning more details about or getting involved in any of the below initiatives, please contact the organisation’s Program Office.
Name of Initiative
Purpose
Latest Status
To discuss current issues and challenges on this front, review processes and procedures, and leverage the community to develop best practices on how best to handle security concerns.
A document with various security threat scenarios was created which represents possible strategies a hostile party may employee to disrupt, imitate or change legitimate message traffic between electronic trading counterparties. The ‘FIX Security White Paper’ (see link in the first column) has been updated to incorporate these scenarios. The group’s top focuses include:
- Continuing to extend the FIX Cybersecurity Best Practices document
- Creation of a regulatory subgroup to consistently monitor regulations globally dealing with cybersecurity
- Development of FIX over TLS Standard – extending the FIX Protocol to meet cybersecurity requirements.
To educate the FIX community on cryptocurrency, with a particular focus on how cryptocurrencies are being traded as well as how the trading life cycle is impacted by cryptocurrency.
A survey was disseminated to the group to find out firm’s understanding of blockchain usage and development activities. The responses revealed that the majority of participants were interested in focusing on best practices, particularly in the post-trade space. The primary framework for blockchain post-trade best practices is being drafted. The existing post-trade best practices will be leveraged in this effort. Additionally, an identifier stream will be established to set-up a framework for digital currency / blockchain identifiers.
To standardise the reporting of the executing venue and create a set of guidelines to provide greater transparency for buy-side clients about where and how their orders are executed by their brokers.
An updated version of the ‘Execution Venue Reporting Best Practices’ was distributed (see link in first column) and is focused on adding further clarity around Last Capacity and Liquidity flag definitions, as well as mandating all executing venues, including broker crossing and alternative trading systems, to supply valid Market Identifier Codes (MICs) on their executions. These changes were made to comply with MiFID II requirements. Going forward, the group has expanded to include all firm types to work through some of the issues and will also globalise the initiative working with representatives from Europe and Asia.