The world’s leading financial market messaging standards organizations have been collaborating to create a financial messaging Investment Roadmap. FIX Protocol Ltd (FPL) has been working with FpML / ISDA (Financial Products Markup Language / International Swaps and Derivatives Association), SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) and ISITC (International Securities Association for Institutional Trade Communication) on this initiative. The purpose of the roadmap is to provide market participants with a consistent and clear direction to messaging standards usage by visually mapping the industry standard protocols FIX, ISO, and FpML to the appropriate business processes across the major asset classes. This collaboration lays the groundwork for moving towards one common financial messaging standard, ISO 20022, while maintaining the existing independent protocols. The Investment Roadmap is now publically available for download from the FPL website at www.fixprotocol.org/investmentroadmap.
In addition to providing the industry with a current view of the ways in which existing messaging standards may be utilized, the Investment Roadmap also defines an agreed path for future initiatives by identifying gaps, as well as areas of overlap. The most important aspect surrounding standards interoperability focuses on the “peering” or transition points at which one may shift from using one standard to another. This will result in higher levels of interoperability for the financial services community and will save firms the cost of maintaining multiple syntaxes within the same area of the transaction lifecycle.
Although the standards organizations still have to ensure that all the relevant data is delivered to the next stage of the transaction chain, they are definitely closer than they have ever been before. This effort will pave the way for the formation of an umbrella collaboration effort amongst various standard bodies and provide clear direction to the financial services industry.
Commenting on this initiative Scott Atwell of American Century Investments, Co-Chair FPL Global Steering Committee, states, “It is clear that the FIX Protocol is the de facto standard for pre-trade and trading, that FpML is the de facto standard for OTC Derivatives, and that ISO is the de facto standard for settlement. We need an approach that leverages these standards into a broader framework without reinventing and creating redundant messages that increase implementation costs and cause confusion for the industry.”