FIX Trading Community has combined two key working groups as part of a focus on using the protocol for high performance trading applications.
The new group will play a key role in the development of the next generation of the FIX Protocol that is used to standardise trading messages.
FIX’s existing High Performance Working Group is be extended to include the initiatives that previously formed part of the Market Data Optimisation Working Group.
The move recognises the growing role market data plays in powering high performance trading strategies and similarly the huge increase in market data availability and streaming data services.
Hanno Klein, co-chair of the FIX Global Technical Committee and senior vice president at Deutsche Börse Group, said, “I believe FIX has already provided a huge value to the financial community by offering a standard language to express interactions between the various parties in order to fulfill their business requirements. FIX Trading Community is now in a unique position to take FIX to the next level by addressing the specific needs of high performance trading and market data.”
He added that while the High Performance Working Group has traditionally been focused on the transactional side of FIX, there has been a need for trading and market data standards to work together to facilitate the rapid transfer of messages among participants and venues.
The new working group will focus on supporting high performance across all levels to promote an open standard that can replace today’s proprietary interfaces in trading and market data. This is all due to be supported in the next generation of the FIX Protocol.
With the new group in place, FIX will begin focusing on its major projects for next year.
"Key priorities for the year ahead will be establishing Draft Standards for Version 1.0 of the new standards out and getting the new market data messaging standard for high performance agreed," Klein said.
"We have a large number of sub-groups looking at specific areas of high-performance trading and market data where standards can be introduced, and we are likely to have more in the future and want to get more industry professionals to volunteer to build stronger standards which will reduce costs for everyone."