London, New York, Hong Kong, 29 October 2020: FIX Trading Community, the non-profit, industry-driven standards body at the heart of global financial trading, announced today their publication of recommended practices for Trade and Post-Trade Bilateral and Tri-Party Repurchase Agreements (Repos).  These recommended practices were produced to define industry practices for the common usage of FIX messaging for Request for Quote (RFQ), Quote, and trade messages for repurchase agreements (repos).

The FIX Repo working group was established to develop a standardized method for automating the full life cycle of Repos to improve efficiencies and reduce risks.   The post-trade workflows include allocations, confirmation, collateral assignment and lifecycle events.  Clearing and settlement workflows will be addressed in subsequent publications.

This effort was focused on leveraging existing FIX messaging to support the Repo requirements.  During the review process the group identified gaps in the FIX Protocol necessary to support the Repo bilateral and tri-party trade and post-trade workflows.  These gaps were addressed in an extension pack which can be found here.

Please use the below links to access the recommended practices documentation:

Recommended Practices Trade Bi-lateral and Tri-party Repos

Recommended Practices Post-Trade Bi-lateral and Tri-party Repos

Steven Kelly, Chair FIX Repo Working Group, Director, Product Management, BrokerTec said, “BrokerTec welcomes the introduction of the FIX recommended guidelines for the repo market.  I would like to take the opportunity to thank the cross-sectional working group for their dedication in developing these industry guidelines. We fully support the working groups guidelines to improve efficiencies and reduce risk for repos, which will benefit the industry as a whole.  BrokerTec Quote, our platform for European Repos launched last year, has adopted these guidelines which has greatly benefited our clients.”

Richard Comotto, Senior Consultant, International Capital Market Association (ICMA) commented, “ICMA welcomes the latest version of FIX for repo. The standardized messaging provided by FIX is important for ensuring immediate, clear and complete trade and post-trade communication between many parties in the repo market. The quality of communication is becoming ever more important as regulators intensify requirements to report within ever tighter timeframes under SFTR and move towards the penalization of settlement failures under CSDR. Standardized messaging is also an essential business requirement in helping firms to reduce the operational costs of repairing and reprocessing poor data, and in minimizing the risks of inaccurate or incomplete transactional information. ICMA is pleased to have been able to contribute to this work.”

Lisa Taikitsadaporn, Technical Program Manager, FIX Trading Community, Managing Partner, Brook Path Partners commented, “While FIX has supported trading of Repurchase Agreements since FIX 4.4 was published in 2003, with the changes in the regulatory landscape and trading needs, it was time to revisit FIX’s support for Repo and make necessary adjustments.  As a result, there were a few gaps in the FIX Protocol standard that needed to be addressed and the prior implementation guidelines published in 2003 were brought up-to-date. Standardization of Repo concepts in FIX will help with data quality when these transactions are reported to regulators.”

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About 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.  Visit www.fixtrading.org  for more information.

Contacts:
Neena Dholani
FIX Trading Community
Tel: +44 (0)20 3950 3934
neena.dholani@fixtrading.org

This document defines industry practices for common usage of FIX protocol for post-trade workflows for repurchase agreements (repos) in a bilateral setting.  (version 0.7)

The purpose of this document is to define industry practices for common usage of FIX protocol for Request for Quote (RFQ), Quote and trade messages for repurchase agreements in a bilateral setting. (version 1.0)

Public Comment – v0.4