It leaves the technology decisions to individual firms.įIX standardizes the language and paradigm of a securities transaction. It does not demand a single type of carrier (e.g., it will work with leased lines, frame relay, Internet), nor does it require a single security protocol. Similarly, FIX avoids over-standardization.
For that reason, while encouraging vendors to utilize the standard, FIX has remained vendor neutral. Openness has been the key to FIX’s success. FIX allows for the efficient creation of connections with a wide range of counter-parties. For technologists FIX provides an open standard that leverages the development and production efforts of the securities industry. FIX provides a foundation for straight through processing. The benefits are:įrom a business perspective FIX provides institutions, brokers, and other market participants a means of reducing the clutter of unnecessary telephone calls and scraps of paper and facilitates targeting high quality information to specific individuals. The result is FIX, an open message standard controlled by no single entity that can be structured to match the requirements of each firm.
These firms believed that they, and the industry as a whole, could benefit from efficiencies derived through the creation of a standard for the electronic communication of indications, orders and executions. The Financial Information eXchange (FIX) effort was initiated in 1992 by a group of institutions interested in streamlining their trading processes.