The FIX Trading Community, the industry association that manages the world’s trading language, the FIX Protocol, has released a new methodology for exchanges and market participants to automatically communicate outages electronically.
Until now there has been no standard way to communicate outages – processes are inconsistent and often manual. This can lead to frustration for market participants and compound the impacts of outages. FIX Executive Director Jim Kaye said by adopting FIX’s Outage Communication Recommended Practices, firms could ensure timely, consistent and efficient communication of outages, updates and resolutions.
“These Recommended Practices are 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,” he said. “Developed by the industry, these practices are simple and cost-effective to implement and provide maximum clarity for participants.”
The new Recommended Practices have been developed partly in response to regulatory guidance from the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), both of whom have called for stricter, more harmonised communication of outages. The Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME), the European Funds and Management Association (EFAMA) and the FIA European Principal Traders Association (FIA EPTA) also last year publicly called on exchanges “to fully and consistently implement outage protocols.”
Kaye said while he expected most exchanges and firms could implement the Recommended Practices via FIX messaging, they could also adopt them easily by other means.
“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,” he said. “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 Recommended Practices cover trading outages, market data outages or other types of technical disruptions across venues, brokers, asset managers, data providers, CCPs, vendors and other market participants. They are asset class agnostic and apply to the full range of outage scopes including outages at the whole market level, trading segment level or instrument level. 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.
FIX will host an Information eXchange webinar on the new Recommended Practices on <date>. Interested parties can find out more and register here.
The FIX Trading Community is an independent global community where capital markets firms come together to solve common issues and shape the evolution of capital markets. FIX groups in over 60 countries are working on a range of global issues including digital assets; reference data; carbon trading; AI; algo trading; FICC and ETFs, while country and regional committees work together to manage local regulation and market structure matters.
