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In a step towards the first fully electronic IPO, the FIX Trading Community (FIX) and the Investment Association (IA), today published an industry best practice framework[SM1] [YW2]  to support the modernisation of equity capital raising processes. By establishing a standard approach, the framework will help make the equity issuance process fully digital while improving efficiency and transparency, with future work expected to build on these standards across IPO and secondary placements. Published by the FIX Equity Issuance Working Group (EIWG), the new recommended practices set out how the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol can support fully digitalised workflows for bookbuilding and deal allocation during equity capital raisings, beginning with Accelerated Bookbuild Offerings (ABOs), covering both direct orders and orders placed with vendors or intermediaries. The framework addresses one of the few remaining areas of capital markets that continues to rely heavily on manual workflows, with orders in IPOs and secondary share placings often communicated by email, telephone or chat message, which can create inefficiencies and increase operational risk. Developed by buy- and sell-side firms as well as technology providers, the guidance takes a vendor-agnostic and system-agnostic approach, providing a standardised way for investment managers, syndicate banks and vendor platforms to communicate throughout the capital raising process. Jim Kaye, Executive Director, FIX Trading Community, said: "FIX has been at the heart of capital markets for over 30 years. As a neutral, global industry association, our focus has always been on solving problems that improve markets for all participants. "Equity issuance is a perfect example of how we have been able to work together to use FIX to solve such a problem, and I’m delighted to see this work come to fruition." Galina Dimitrova, Director of Investments and Capital Markets at the IA, said: "Strong capital markets are the bedrock of the UK's financial services sector and vital to the health of the wider economy. Ensuring the UK's IPO process remains competitive and attractive to issuers and investors is therefore essential. Yet, while much of the investment ecosystem has become increasingly digital over recent decades, equity capital raising remains heavily reliant on manual processes and fragmented workflows. "These new recommended practices represent an important step forward. By providing an industry-led framework for the electronic communication of orders and allocations, the working group has laid the foundations for greater automation, reduced operational risk and a better experience for investors and issuers." Daniel Riches, buy-side co-chair of the EIWG, FIX Trading Community, and Head of Equity Dealing at M&G Investments, said: “This work enables the removal of many of the manual processes and risks around order handling in primary capital markets. Through these new standards, the buy-side and sell-side can experience the benefits of FIX workflows already seen in secondary markets within the new issuance markets. This includes managing scale, increased operational efficiency and enhancing the data foundation for all stakeholders, while incorporating the strong FIX governance framework and technical expertise.“  Jeremy Bruce, sell-side co-chair of the EIWG, FIX Trading Community and Head of Trading EMEA at Bernstein, said: “The aim of this roadmap was to leverage FIX’s system- and vendor-agnostic nature to enable buy-side traders to place orders for an IPO or ABO via FIX in the same way that they are able to execute secondary market trading, whether they do this directly or via a vendor platform. Not only will this create efficiency, it will also reduce operational risk via human error. Just as importantly, it will make IPOs more transparent, ensuring investor confidence and delivering better compliance outcomes.”

The FIX Trading Community, the industry association that manages the world’s trading language, the FIX Protocol, has responded with feedback to IOSCO’s Supervisory Toolkit for AI Use in Capital Markets with a suite of recommendations based upon the industry’s established approach to algorithmic trading.  FIX Executive Director Jim Kaye said that while there was much debate about how the finance industry should deal with AI, there were robust, globally accepted practices already in place that are transferrable to many of the problems arising from AI adoption.  “Many of the potential problems with agentic AI can be mitigated by ensuring appropriate testing, certification, and workflow oversight and record-keeping,” he said. “The good news is that FIX has already done much of the groundwork as part of our work on algorithmic trading, and we are now working on deployment-ready practices that are based on or build upon existing practices, making them easier for firms to implement.”  Mr Kaye emphasised that the FIX AI Working Group – which includes buy- and sell-side firms –  strongly recommended that global, industry-led standards be put in place for agentic AI governance, testing, and certification. The Group has already developed a cross-jurisdictional algorithm testing and certification methodology, which includes scenario testing, system interoperability, and market disorder contribution testing.  “Relying on fragmented, firm-specific approaches injects just the types of risk people worry about when it comes to AI,” he said. “IOSCO is absolutely right to centre itself in this discussion, and our working group members are very keen to contribute a practical, industry-led solution that allows for innovation without injecting additional risk to global markets.”  The FIX Trading Community is the custodian of the FIX Protocol - the trading language that underpins global financial markets. An independent, non-profit, global organisation, FIX brings firms together to solve common issues and shape the evolution of financial capital markets. Through more than 40 working groups and committees in over 60 countries, FIX maintains and develops the FIX Protocol and other trading standards; helps shape regulation; and supports the industry across a wide range of global issues including digital assets implementation, AI and automation, liquidity, data quality and trading workflows. FIX's work is only possible through the support of its members - to find out more visit www.fixtrading.org. 

The FIX Trading Community, the industry association that manages the world’s trading language, the FIX Protocol, has called on the European Securities and Markets Authority's (ESMA) to improve significant issues with data reporting that lead to detrimental impacts on overall market health, in its response to last month’s Call for Evidence on European Equities Market Structure consultation.  Executive Director Jim Kaye said problems with trade identification and reporting mean that the overall size of the European market is impossible to measure accurately, and trend analysis is muddied by data problems and the need to isolate different trading sessions, special trading days and other trading events for comparison purposes. “The way trades are flagged currently mean investors can’t separate price-forming transactions from duplicate or technical reporting, and so are dramatically under-estimating European market size and liquidity,” he said. “Clarifications to RTS 1 to enable accurate market volume calculations can be enacted quicky and easily, positioning European markets as transparent, efficient, and attractive to global capital.” FIX’s key recommendations include: -Suppressing non price-forming events by extending post-trade transparency (PTT) exemptions. - Fixing post-Brexit reporting issues that result in duplication of reporting, by recognising the UK RTS 1 PTT as equivalent. - Exempting intra-group risk management transactions from PTT requirements. - Reducing ETF NAV reporting requirements from three to one, aligning with Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) practices to reduce reporting burden and improve data clarity. - Improving capture of closing price activity by expanding benchmark trade definitions to include market closing prices and introducing the CLSE flag, as per FCA practices. - Clarifying regulatory guidelines around a) chains of counterparties and b) off-book cross-border transactions, to eliminate duplicate reporting. The response also comments extensively on addressable liquidity and the need to factor in the distinct concepts of price formation (trades with real economic interest), and accessibility (availability and suitability of different types of liquidity for different types of clients), taking into account factors such as timing, automation and transaction type.  “These modifications are essential for European market development and efficiency,” Mr Kaye said. “They align with established practices, we believe will be relatively straightforward to implement, and FIX is ready and willing to assist with technical support.”  The FIX Trading Community is the custodian of the FIX Protocol - the trading language that underpins global financial markets. An independent, non-profit, global organisation, FIX brings firms together to solve common issues and shape the evolution of financial capital markets. Through more than 40 working groups and committees in over 60 countries, FIX maintains and develops the FIX Protocol and other trading standards; helps shape regulation; and supports the industry across a wide range of global issues including digital assets implementation, AI and automation, liquidity, data quality and trading workflows. FIX's work is only possible through the support of its members - to find out more visit www.fixtrading.org. 

The FIX Trading Community today announced the adoption of an automated development workflow for the FIX Standard based on the Orchestra Domain Specific Language (DSL), supported by tooling from Atomic Wire Technology. The initiative modernises the way changes to the FIX Standard are authored, validated and published, providing a more structured and transparent approach to standards development while preserving the collaborative governance that has underpinned FIX for more than three decades. Rather than manually maintaining repository artefacts, the Orchestra DSL enables proposed changes to be expressed in a structured, machine-readable form. These changes can then be automatically validated, combined and used to generate updated repository artefacts, providing greater consistency, traceability and confidence throughout the standards development lifecycle. The automated workflow introduces validation throughout the build process, helping identify issues such as incompatible changes and repository inconsistencies earlier in the development cycle. It also creates a complete audit trail of how the standard evolves over time and supports parallel development, enabling multiple working groups to contribute more efficiently. In addition to producing the authoritative repository, the build process automatically generates a range of derived artefacts, including FIXML schemas and implementation reports, ensuring consistency across all published outputs. Jim Kaye, Executive Director of the FIX Trading Community, said: "The FIX Standard continues to evolve alongside increasingly sophisticated global markets. By adopting an automated development workflow based on the Orchestra DSL, we are modernising the way the standard is developed and published, improving efficiency for our contributors while strengthening the quality and consistency of our releases." Martin Swanson, Founder of Atomic Wire, said: "This is about applying modern software engineering principles to standards development. The Orchestra DSL provides a structured way to describe the evolution of the standard, while automation ensures those changes can be validated, managed and published consistently. It creates a stronger foundation for the future evolution of FIX and for the tooling and services that will build upon it." This announcement represents the first step in a broader programme to modernise the infrastructure supporting the FIX Standard. By establishing an automated standards development pipeline, the FIX Trading Community is creating a foundation for future improvements in how the standard is published, consumed and integrated into the wider financial technology ecosystem.

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 . 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.  

The FIX Trading Community, the industry association that manages the world’s trading language, the FIX Protocol, has released new Recommended Practices for Algorithm Testing and Certification. FIX Executive Director Jim Kaye said the Recommended Practices meet a need for standardised, electronic mechanisms for firms to test and certify their algorithms and communicate certification information to counterparties and regulators. “Robust regulations exist to mandate the testing and certification of algorithms, but until now there has been a lack of consistency in how this requirement is met and communicated,” he said. “FIX’s algorithmic trading working group has worked through this in detail to define best practices, and guide firms in implementing these.” The Recommended Practices cover workflows and message descriptions for: * Defining the configuration of systems to be used for testing algorithms. * Running tests, orchestrating different test systems where appropriate, and communicating the results of testing. * Approving an algorithm as being suitable for production usage and communicating that in the form of a certificate. The Recommended Practices ensure that algo certificates contain standardised, meaningful data to both to meet minimum legal requirements, and facilitate much fuller information for storage in in-house algorithm inventory systems. This includes precise definitions of algorithms beyond mere identifiers, comprehensive documentation of performed tests, and clear reporting of results. FIX will hold an online FIX Information eXchange workshop to go through the Recommended Practices in the coming weeks. The FIX Algorithmic Trading Working Group is now turning their attention to algos and AI. This includes modeling agentic workflows, governance and testing of agentic workflows, and using FIX over AI-native protocols such as MCP and A2A. FIX member firms are welcome to join the working group to contribute to this important work. 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.