Asia Awards 2025: Best trading network—Iress

Overview

Iress’ FIX Hub is a cloud-native financial information exchange platform that connects the buy side, sell side and trading venues across global markets. It is designed to simplify connectivity between financial institutions, allowing communication and data exchange. It addresses the complexity and inefficiencies in connecting to multiple liquidity providers, exchanges and market participants, streamlining trade execution and improving operational efficiency.

The solution  

Iress’ FIX Hub is designed to simplify connectivity by offering a centralized platform integrating multiple liquidity providers, exchanges, and trading systems. It standardizes messaging protocols, reducing the need for complex individual connections. This streamlines trade execution, ensures faster order processing, and minimizes manual intervention, thus improving overall efficiency and reducing operational risks for financial institutions.

Secret sauce  

Iress FIX Hub is a cloud-native platform that streamlines trading by integrating multiple liquidity providers, exchanges, and trading systems via a single connection. It offers flexibility for various trading strategies and asset classes, with customizable connectivity options. Built-in daily reconciliation, validation, and order flow monitoring reduce manual intervention, simplifying operations and enhancing efficiency.

Recent milestones

• Iress’ FIX Hub launched in Australia in October 2023 and has since expanded to six other countries, including Singapore, the UK, Hong Kong, the US, Canada and South Africa, enabling global reach with localized flow.
• FIX Hub supports more than 130 FIX connections with low-touch onboarding and rapid session deployment, reducing setup time from months to hours.
• In 2024, Iress introduced a self-service monitoring tool to the FIX Hub, enabling alerting and exception-handling across all FIX sessions.

Future objectives

• Iress will launch internal and external “quarantine” supporting intervention and triage of rejected FIX messages through the FIX Hospital.
• Iress will enhance real-time control with a new FIX risk feature, which will triage orders and then re-submit them instantly with new self-service options.

Why they won

Melbourne-based Iress wins its first ever WatersTechnology Asia award by walking away with the prestigious best trading network category, thanks to its outstanding FIX Hub offering. Iress’ cloud-based FIX Hub is essentially a connectivity hub/network for various market participants designed to streamline trade execution and improve operational robustness and efficiency. 

It features a blend of compelling qualities, including simplicity, standardized messaging protocols, significantly reduced time to market for new implementations, straight-through processing that reduces manual intervention and consequently potential errors, and fast order processing to ensure trades are executed with the minimum of latency. Given the profile of the names Iress beat to this year’s title, only a fool would bet against Iress repeating its inaugural success when next year’s awards roll around.