Standards body FIX Protocol Limited (FPL) is calling on trading venues and other stakeholders to take part in a review of how FIX could be used to support high performance trading.
The initiative could lead to market participants connecting to high speed trading venues benefiting from greater cost efficiencies and more efficient communications, according to FPL.
By using a system called "simple binary encoding" (SBE), FPL says the verbosity of the FIX messaging language can be significantly reduced, enhancing its speed and offering an alternative to various proprietary protocols used in high speed trading.
Kevin Houstoun, co-chair of the FPL global technical committee and chairman and founder of software provider Rapid Addition, said: "Whilst there are very high performance implementations of FIX, there are currently a variety of proprietary binary systems in place to make high performance trading interfaces easier to write, but with around ten separate interfaces in the market, this is introducing a large amount of additional costs.
"By moving to a standardised high performance solution with an ancestry in FIX there is a significant opportunity to drive down costs."
FPL has already reached out to market participants using the two current, well-adopted industry encoding standard, Google Protocol Buffer and ASN standards, creating guidelines to provide a framework demonstrating how FIX can be mapped to either encoding method.
Market participants looking to take part in the review can email fpl@fixprotocol.org