London, New York, 30th June 2016: FIX Trading Community, the non-profit, industry-driven standards body at the heart of global financial trading, today announced the release of Simple Binary Encoding (SBE) version 1.0 Draft Standard to support high performance demands in transactions and/or data feeds.
Recent improvements in the speed of hardware, software and network connections have prompted the High Performance Working Group to examine the current version of the FIX Protocol to address how the requirements for new financial applications such as high-frequency trading and market data can be met. The challenge was to produce a standard, non-proprietary binary message encoding which is intended to work independently or in conjunction with other high performance FIX standards.
Simple Binary Encoding is optimized for low latency and implementations have been demonstrated to encode or decode messages in the realm of tens of nanoseconds. These requirements are tailored to high performance trading whilst other FIX encodings, such as tag=value and FIXML are still fit-for-purpose for other use cases. SBE has already been implemented and successfully used by a number of different market participants.
More details on this the reference implementation for this project can be found here.
Don Mendelson, Chair of the FIX Simple Binary Encoding Subgroup, noted, “FIX Simple Binary Encoding version 1.0 Draft Standard is the culmination of four years of collaboration by working group participants. Thanks to their hard work, SBE has already been successfully used by CME Group, Moscow Exchange, Thomson Reuters and others. The open source implementations developed by Real Logic are among the best messaging libraries in the business, and they’re available to everyone to use.”
Fred Malabre, Senior Director, Architecture and Product Management, CME Group, commented, “Good collaboration and representation within the FIX Trading Community allowed the creation of a FIX standard for high performance encoding. FIX Simple Binary Encoding provides a good solution to existing challenges and resulted in an early adoption by various exchanges and vendors, including CME Group Globex Market Data Interfaces. As the industry upgrades trading interfaces, FIX Simple Binary Encoding in its Draft Standard becomes a natural choice to meet performance and efficiency needs for encoding of FIX messages.”
Martin Thompson, founder Real Logic, noted, “ASCII message encodings, such as FIX tag value, are now one of the most inefficient stages of transaction processing. It is great to see the FIX community leading the way with the most efficient binary protocol for financial messages, and validating the specification by supporting an open source reference implementation. The SBE initiative can benefit the whole community in terms of efficient use of development effort, CPU, and storage resources.”
The FIX Trading Community would like to invite companies to volunteer to help demonstrate the interoperability of SBE. For more information please contact the FIX Trading Community Program Office.