Published by: Finance Feeds | 18th May 2021

The cooperation aims to promote the development and use of standards for the entire life cycle of the electronic trading of digital assets from buy-side, sell-side, exchanges/trading venues, settlement/custody, and regulatory compliance/reporting.

The FIX Trading Community has partnered with the Global Digital Asset & Cryptocurrency Association (Global DCA) to strategically combine their complementary efforts to further promote standardization for trading digital assets.

The FIX Trading Community, which owns and maintains the FIX Protocol, has an active Digital Asset Working Group (DAWG) focused on the use of FIX for the electronic trading of digital assets and is also involved in ISO TC68/SC8/WG3 in the development of other standards for this industry.

The Global DCA was established to guide the evolution of digital assets, cryptocurrencies, and the underlying blockchain technology within a regulatory framework designed to build public trust, foster market integrity, and maximize economic opportunity for all participants.

The FIX Trading Community DAWG and Global DCA will share information and experience to achieve their common goals. The cooperation aims to promote the development and use of standards for the entire life cycle of the electronic trading of digital assets from buy-side, sell-side, exchanges/trading venues, settlement/custody, and regulatory compliance/reporting.

Tony Pettipiece, Board of Directors and Chair of the Policy & Regulation Committee at the Global DCA, commented: “We are excited to be working with the FIX Trading Community to help shape the evolving standards for the trading of digital assets, and also to leverage the expertise of GDCA members by FIX institutional traders as their participation in digital assets continues to grow.”

Sean Ristau, co-chair FIX Digital Asset Working Group, EVP of Account Management & Solution Engineering, Prime Trust, said: “Promoting the use of clear standards is central to the FIX Trading Community mission. As the de facto standard for electronic trading, we are excited about the opportunity for FIX to become ubiquitous in the trading of digital assets. Cross collaboration is key and has helped the digital asset community with the hyper-growth being experienced. We look forward to working with the Global DCA and its’ membership to promote standards for the evolving digital economy.”

Just as FIX has reduced costs for the traditional financial industry, a FIX standard for digital assets could significantly reduce the technical friction and cost for traditional financial industry participants to interact with newer crypto exchanges.

Pre-trade efficiencies in market data and quoting, and post-trade efficiencies in trade reporting and settlement would be possible, serving market data vendors, buy-side institutions, and custodians.

Regulators could more easily track the new digital asset landscape if they could leverage the same reporting infrastructure employed within traditional asset classes.

FIX Trading Community began its life in 1992 as an equities protocol, but since then has expanded to include equity options, fixed income, forex, listed derivatives, and a wide range of OTC products.

FIX already has a modular data model for assets and parties, and a rich message catalog for transaction workflows, including orders and executions, market data, reference data, and trade reporting.

According to the community, very little in the FIX Protocol actually needs to change to support digital assets.

Click here to view online.

This document outlines the history of ISO and the FIX Trading Community’s collaboration with the International Standards Organization.

London, New York, Hong Kong, 17 August 2020: FIX Trading Community, the non-profit, industry-driven standards body at the heart of global financial trading, announced today their submission of the FIX session layer standard and the FIX tagvalue encoding standard for standardization, to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) via Technical Committee TC 68 – Financial Services, Subcommittee 9 – Information Exchange (ISO TC 68/SC 9).  The submission is currently being balloted by national member bodies of ISO TC 68/SC 9.

The FIX Trading Community is built around clear standards and is committed to interoperability with open standards.  FIX is considered the de facto global standard for electronic trading and it seemed appropriate to be considered as an ISO standard which is recognized and accepted globally. The FIX session layer and tagvalue encoding standards have served as the basis for electronic trading for 25 years. These standards have been adopted by tens of thousands of market participants and in over one hundred countries around the globe.

FIX session layer standard: The session layer provides reliable and recoverable messaging for electronic trading. The FIX session layer standard has been integrated into a single refactored volume with multiple session profiles, which describe specific realizations of the FIX session layer.

FIX tagvalue encoding standard: The tagvalue encoding is used by both the FIX application and the FIX session layer. The encoding uses an integer number known as a tag to identify the field, followed by the “=” character (hexadecimal 0x3D), then the value of that field encoded in the ISO 8859-1 character set. Each tagvalue pair is separated by the Start of Heading control character <SOH> (hexadecimal value 0x01), which is defined by ISO 6429:1992.

FIX Trading Community participants will recognize an immediate benefit from the higher quality standards documents that should lead to improved interoperability between implementations. Adopters of the FIX standards will benefit from the certainty of the ISO standardization process and the value of ISO branding.

Please click here to view a blog post on the subject. Please click here to view the submissions on the ISO website.

Jim Northey, FIX Global Technical Committee co-chair who also serves as the ISO TC 68 Chair, commented, “The process we pursued to improve the quality of our specifications prior to submitting to ISO by both refactoring and moving to a machine readable format based upon FIX Orchestra should provide immediate benefit to the FIX community. The FIX Trading Community continues to actively participate and provide leadership within ISO TC 68. Most people don’t realize that the FIX standard itself relies upon and uses over twenty ISO standards.”

Richard Evans and Lee Saba, FIX Global Steering Committee co-chairs, commented, “We recognize the importance of pursuing ISO standardization of FIX. FIX is how the world trades, and as global regulators move towards requiring ISO standardization, we want to ensure that we continue to provide operational efficiencies for FIX adopters.  The FIX Trading Community is committed to ISO participation and provides resources for ISO TC68 SC8 and SC9.”

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This Extension Pack supports the US SEC order approving a plan to implement a Tick Size Pilot Program and specifically to meet the requirements for a new order type of Trade At Intermarket Sweep Order (TAISO).