The FIX Trading Community’s FIX Protocol (the industry association that manages the world’s trading language) has unveiled its new methodology for market outages.
The ‘recommended practices’ have specifically been developed to assist exchanges and market participants in automatically communicating outages electronically.
“Developed by the industry, these practices are simple and cost-effective to implement and provide maximum clarity for participants,” said Jim Kaye, FIX executive director.
“[…] obviously very relevant to exchanges and other trading venues, where outages impact whole markets, but they’re also recommended for brokers, data vendors and other critical service providers.”
In terms of implementing the ‘recommended practices’ most exchanges and firms are set to be able to do so via FIX messaging, however they could also adopt them easily by other means, explained Kaye.
“Almost all participants use FIX, so this is likely to be a common method of implementation, but it’s not the only way to do it. These ‘recommended practices’ define who communicates what, to whom, and when, along with definitions of the data elements within those flows, and can be implemented via whatever means makes the most sense for each participant. This could be regular FIX; it could equally be HTML for websites or emails.”
The new protocol has been developed partly in response to regulatory guidance from ESMA and the FCA, following calls for stricter and more harmonised communication in the event of market outages.
Inconsistent, manual processes have continued to come under significant scrutiny in recent times from industry participants eager for more reliable market infrastructure.
In October 2025, AFME, EFAMA and FIA EPTA urged European stock exchanges to improve outage management with enhanced protocols, in light of trading disruptions which had impacted equity markets in the months prior.
Read more: Tech glitches should not be the cause of stock exchange outages in this day and age
Kaye first spoke with The TRADE about FIX’s plans for outage protocols back in January 2024, at the time highlighting how the FIX Trading Community was set to approach the standardisation of communication protocols and what (and who) was front of mind.
“On the trading desk, if you have a problem with the system, often everyone starts phoning up all the clients simultaneously but being able to do that electronically would speed things up very, very quickly. Sometimes the message is all you need to help continue to trade and the quicker you can get that done, the better,” said Kaye at the time.
FIX’s ‘recommended practices’ have been developed to be asset class agnostic and apply to various outage types including trading outages and market data outages – at the whole market level, trading level and/or instrument level.
The protocol also includes other types of technical disruptions across: venues, brokers, asset managers, data providers, CCPs, vendors and other market participants, confirmed the industry body.
“The design builds on work done to support European consolidated tapes, where providing trading and instrument status information is a key requirement, however it provides much more granularity to address regulatory guidance and capture requests from market participants,” said FIX.