The FIX Trading Community is opening its technical standards process to software developers throughout the financial industry using GitHub, with several high performance projects already published to the repository.
FIX says the open source software resource will promote fairness, lower costs, and should lead to quality and reliability improvements in standards development.
Two specifications have been published in GitHub so far, including a FIX standard for binary messaging and a performance session layer protocol for exchanging messages between counterparties.
Implementation code is licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0, which allows developers to freely use, modify and redistribute code.
The group says additional encodings of FIX, such as FIXML, Google Protocol Buffers, and ASN.1 will soon be published on GitHub.
Jim Northey, principal consultant and industry standards liaison, CameronTec and co-chair, global technical committee, FIX Trading Community, says: “We realised 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. 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, that fully meets the requirements of the modern execution venue."