1 December 2025 – FIX Trading Community, together with the Investment Association (IA) and the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME), have today announced a crossindustry taskforce to create electronic communication standards and promote industry-wide solutions to make equity capital raising – such as IPOs and secondary share placements –more efficient, transparent and digital.
The new Equity Issuance Working Group (EIWG) will consider how best to use the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol, the de facto messaging standard for pre-trade and trade communication in the global equity markets, to support fully digitalised workflows, including for bookbuilding and allocation during the placing process.
This initiative will support the UK government’s wider objective of modernising the country’s capital markets to support growth and to ensure it remains a world class environment in which to invest and do business.
The creation of the group builds on previous industry collaboration and follows the IA’s position paper published last November, which called for modernising the largely manual IPO and secondary placing process to reduce errors and improve efficiency.
The EIWG will be co-chaired by Daniel Riches, Head of Equity Dealing at M&G Investments, and a sell-side co-chair still to be appointed.
In parallel, the IA and AFME will work to establish best practice for publishing unique identifiers before IPOs and secondary placements to further streamline the process.
Galina Dimitrova, Director, Investments & Capital Markets at the IA, said: “Strong capital markets are the bedrock of the UK’s financial services sector, and vital to the health of the wider domestic business environment. We are therefore delighted to support FIX in establishing this working group. As IPOs and secondary market placements remain among the few areas within the capital market that are still reliant on manual processing, we look forward to collaborating across the industry to achieve full electronification.”
Jim Kaye, Executive Director at FIX Trading Community, said: “FIX is a natural mechanism for bringing efficiency to equity capital raising. FIX was the birthplace of electronification over 30 years ago – we have seen sector after sector realise the benefits of automation, and we look forward to bringing these benefits to the IPO and secondary market space.”
Dan Riches, Head of Equity Dealing at M&G Investments, said: “I’m privileged to co-chair this important cross-industry exercise to bring greater efficiency, scalable solutions and reduced operational risk to equities primary capital markets. By applying FIX standards – particularly for bookbuilding and allocation for IPOs and secondary placements – we can create clearer, more efficient digital processes, making for a more transparent experience for issuers, investors and intermediaries. This effort aligns with the UK’s wider ambition to modernise capital markets and support growth – I look forward to working through the new Equity Issuance Working Group to help make that ambition a reality.”
About the Investment Association (IA):
- The IA champions UK investment management, supporting British savers, investors and businesses. Our 250 members manage £10.0 trillion of assets.
- Our mission is to make investment better. Better for clients, so they achieve their financial goals. Better for companies, so they get the capital they need to grow.
And better for the economy, so everyone prospers. - Our purpose is to ensure investment managers are in the best possible position
to:- Build people’s resilience to financial adversity
- Help people achieve their financial aspirations
- Enable people to maintain a decent standard of living as they grow older
- Contribute to economic growth through the efficient allocation of capital.
- The money our members manage is in a wide variety of investment vehicles
including authorised investment funds, pension funds and stocks and shares
ISAs. - The UK is the second largest investment management centre in the world after the US, and manages £5.1 trillion in overseas client AUM.
About FIX Trading Community:
The FIX Trading Community is the only independent global community where capital markets firms come together to solve common issues and shape the evolution of
capital markets. FIX groups in over 60 countries are working on a range of global issues including digital assets; reference data; carbon trading; AI; algo trading; FICC
and ETFs, while country and regional committees work together to manage local regulation and market structure matters.