Trade Processing
Always optimising, continuously expanding, constantly adapting.
FIX has developed standards and guidelines covering the entire front and middle office, with many of these produced and adopted over two decades ago.
Trade processing remains complex and, in many cases, at least partially reliant on manual processing. The move to shorter settlement cycles for securities and the rise of new technologies such as distributed ledger provide drivers and opportunities to revisit this crucial area, redesign workflows and introduce electronic communication and automation throughout.
FIX's work covers areas of the trade lifecycle not conventionally majority covered by other standards such as ISO 20022, plus asset servicing and similar workflows where standards either do not exist or are sparsely adopted.
To find out more or to get involved, please contact us.
Current Initiatives
Post Trade Committee
The global shift to T+1 settlement aims to enhance market efficiency, reduce counterparty risk, boost liquidity and lower transaction costs. India moved in early 2023, North America followed in Spring 2024 and the UK and EU are scheduled to implement in Oct. 2027. FIX developed allocation and confirmation messaging over twenty years ago, supplemented by payment information and settlement status information more recently (details can be found in our post trade guidelines)
In addition to the need to review and, where appropriate, participate in regulatory consultations, our post trade committee has identified three key areas of focus:
- Simplified documentation and education of existing FIX middle office messaging capabilities and workflows, particularly allocations and confirmations.
- Analysis of and improvements to client onboarding, seeking to speed up the process and eliminate data errors.
- Promoting usage of electronic settlement instruction data, both for reference data access and provision on middle office messages, including PSET (place of settlement) and PSAF (place of safekeeping).
Securities Lending WG
The ability to process securities lending operations quickly has been identified as a key area for supporting the move to T+1 as well as being desirable in its own right. Though a number of workflow messaging platforms exist which have improved productivity and speed in this area, there is still a significant level of manual processing and a desire to develop open messaging standards. Significant work has already been done particularly in the area of both centrally cleared and non-cleared loan processing.
The securities lending working group has put together an extensive road map of work being delivered in small but frequent phases to expedite delivery. The first two of these are:
- Electronic communication of an intent to borrow or lend between Securities Lending Participants with confirmation of matched trades with all applicable booking parameters - scope includes US Equities and US Corporate Bonds DTCC eligible DVP US Cash Collateral contracts - this was completed in December 2025.
- Electronic communication availability lists and quote/negotiation workflows- this was completed in July 2026.
Future planned work includes expansion to other products and other aspects of securities lending workflows.
Post Trade Committee
Work has started to define any required changes to the FIX Protocol and document recommended practices to support US treasury clearing. Based on analysis conducted so far, the initial go-live is not expected to require any changes to the FIX Protocol though documentation work is needed to clarify identification of clearing houses and members on relevant messages. As scope moves to repo, documentation work will be required to bring existing credit checking workflows developed for Dodd Frank over to US treasury repo.
