44 | FIX
Multi-Tasking For Successful Implementation
By Tim Healy, Global Marketing and Communications Director, FIX Trading Community FIX Trading Community is taking the initiative as markets prepare for the impact of MiFID II and meet new challenges. The second half of 2016 saw a significant uptick in meetings and calls relating to the impending Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) regulation. What became clear, is that the marketplace is keen for FIX to provide some practical answers to the implementation questions and members have stepped up to work collaboratively and set down on paper, guidelines, best practices and workflows. Additionally, changes to the FIX Protocol will occur with new tags and new values for existing tags in order to pass required information between investment firms and venues. Clearly, 2017 will be another busy year for the FIX Trading Community and its members. By the time this article is published, the first in a series of extensions to the FIX Protocol will have been published which covers a number of the requirements of MiFID II, particularly RTS 22 and 24. Without going into specific detail here, what is worth noting is that FIX is endeavouring to make sure that all firms who are under
GLOBALTRADING | Q1 • 2017
MiFID II obligations will have the ability to be compliant in an efficient manner. FIX is ubiquitous in trading and it is important that the enhancements to the Protocol are available for all investment firms. Regulators are keen to see a standardised approach to the solutions that investment firms use to meet their obligations and a unilateral, rather than bilateral, approach is far more sensible and efficient. Away from the regulatory aspect, there were a number of other initiatives during 2016 that members worked on, the aim for these being to bring even greater efficiencies to processes and workflows. Last August, new guidelines were released for the use of FIX in post-trade processing for multi-asset classes. The Global Post Trade Working Group has been working on providing a standardised and detailed set of guidelines for futures, equity swaps and FX equity options for some time now and, with the release of this new document, FIX has addressed issues by providing a common workflow with minimal differences across asset classes. Market participants will be able to reduce risk and have