What is FIX Trading Community?

FIX Trading Community™ is the non-profit, industry-driven standards body at the heart of global trading.

The organisation is independent and neutral, dedicated to addressing real business and regulatory issues impacting multi-asset trading in global markets through standardisation, delivering operational efficiency, increased transparency, and reduced costs and risks for all market participants.

Central to FIX Trading Community’s work is the continuous development and promotion of the FIX family of standards, including the core FIX Protocol messaging language, which has revolutionised the trading environment and has successfully become the way the world trades.

As an industry-driven organisation, all FIX Trading Community initiatives are pursued in response to market participant requests. This work is organised through a global network of committees, subcommittees and working groups that attract colleagues, peers and competitors who work together in a collaborative manner, free from commercial conflict, and in a way rarely witnessed in the capital markets to address core industry challenges. These efforts are supported by a small team of resources based in New York, Hong Kong and London.

FIX Trading Community was previously known as FIX Protocol Ltd (and this remains its full legal entity name). Since its launch in 1998, the organisation has achieved tremendous success, developing and encouraging adoption of the FIX messaging standard. However, in recent years, whilst the continuous enhancement and promotion of FIX has remained a core goal, the organisation was also successfully leading work exploring how other non-proprietary, free and open standards could effectively support evolving needs.

This led to the belief that the existing brand, no longer truly reflected the many ways in which the organisation supports the industry, nor the countless opportunities that actively participating in this vibrant community presents. The result of which was the decision to rebrand the organisation as FIX Trading Community in August 2013.

FIX Trading Community is global:

  • The organisation’s membership includes 270+ leading financial service companies, spanning 6 different continents. 35% of members are EMEA based, 29% across the Americas, and 26% in Asia Pacific and Japan.
  • By joining, your firm’s employees all over the world can participate in local and international initiatives led by the organisation’s many committees and working groups.
  • 3,000+ representatives from FIX Trading Community’s 270+ member firms participate in the organisation’s committees and working groups.

FIX Trading Community brings the industry together:

  • Attracting buy and sell-side firms, trading venues, regulators, vendors and other industry associations, the wealth of knowledge and different perspectives shared by its broad membership, ensures all initiatives deliver wide industry benefit.
  • The organisation has grown its buy-side members considerably over the past few years with approximately 52 buy-side members to date.
  • The FIX messaging language was originally developed over 20 years ago and FIX Trading Community has been active for nearly 20 years.
  • FIX Trading Community brings together colleagues, peers and competitors to work together collaboratively through the organisation’s many committees and working groups. They do so free from commercial conflict, and in a way rarely witnessed in the capital markets, to address industry challenges.
  • 4,400+ delegates attended FIX Trading Community’s global events over the past year.

FIX Trading Community is involved in much more than you may think:

  • FIX Trading Community isn’t just about promoting the FIX Protocol, but the use of mass adopted, non-proprietary, free and open standards to address the business and regulatory issues impacting multi-asset trading in global markets.
  • The organisation has a multi-asset focus, supporting the equities, fixed income, listed derivatives and foreign exchange markets throughout the trade life-cycle from pre-trade through to post-trade, pre-settlement.
  • FIX Trading Community doesn’t just address technical challenges; a high proportion of active members are business leaders. Its global leadership includes Managing Directors, CEOs, Company Founders, Regional Heads of Trading, Marketing Directors, Senior Advisors and Strategists.
  • FIX Trading Community works with regulators globally to encourage the adoption of non-proprietary, free and open standards for regulatory reporting, enabling the industry to leverage its existing investments to meet emerging needs. This has led to meetings with the EU, ESMA, CESR, FCA, ASIC, SFC, SEC, CFTC, FINRA, IIROC and IOSCO.

FIX Trading Community’s work is shaping the future trading environment:

  • Highlights of key initiatives currently underway within the FIX Trading Community:
    • Discussing current issues and challenges on the cybersecurity front, reviewing processes and procedures, and leveraging the community to develop best practices on how best to handle security concerns.
    • Standardizing the reporting of the executing venue and creating a set of guidelines to provide greater transparency for the buy-side clients about where and how their orders are executed by their brokers.
    • Addressing the work of generating machine readable rules for FIX Specifications to improve operational efficiency and the value of the FIX Protocol by reducing the time and effort it takes to onboard, certify, and deploy new FIX connections with counterparties.
    • Creating a practice that would bring the new issue order placing process in line with the same procedure used for secondary market orders and trade fills.
    • Exploring how to effectively address the many challenges impacting global post-trade processing to encourage the development of increased transparency, reduced costs and greater efficiencies in this space.
    • Discussing and addressing specific regulatory technical standards (RTS) items and providing guidelines and best practices to meet these regulatory requirements.

FIX Trading Community: Finally, the secret to its success:

  • FIX Trading Community has always been a not-for-profit organisation. Its work is driven by industry needs and its unfaltering independence and neutrality have been critical to its success.