FIX Trading Community Opens Technical Standards Process to Developers

FIX Trading Community said the aim of the project is to "promote fairness, lower costs, and should lead to quality and reliability improvements," by using open source licenses on the GitHub platform to create and implement a single venue interface.

Several FIX projects have already been published to the platform. The FIX High Performance Working Group has also posted standards for binary messaging and a performance session layer protocol for exchanging messages between counterparties. Additional encodings of FIX, such as FIXML, Google Protocol Buffers, and ASN.1, will also be made available through the open process.

"We realized that while standard FIX is highly performant, there is an additional need for a high performance interface for order routing and market data to support the modern trading venue," says Jim Northey, co-chair of Global Technical Committee for FIX Trading Community. "This need is currently being met with varying levels of success and completeness by a myriad of proprietary protocols. Our goal is to provide a FIX based standard, including an open source reference implementation, which fully meets the requirements of the modern execution venue."