FIX Trading Community has just announced the publication of Release Candidate 3 for FIX Orchestra for public review, to help the industry move further towards standardisation and automation of rules of engagement and deliver major efficiencies to the counterparty onboarding process. This enables firms to define their service offerings in an entirely systematic way, allowing them to certify their flows faster and with greater accuracy, while significantly reducing the need for manual intervention.
FIX Orchestra was conceived as machine readable rules of engagement between counterparties. As such, it is a standard for the exchange of metadata about the behaviour of FIX applications that will allow adopters of not only FIX, but any messaging protocol, to describe their service offering. The ultimate goal of FIX Orchestra is to bring the capability of “Plug and Play” into the FIX ecosystem following the evolution of computer systems over the past twenty years in order to greatly improve operational efficiency and reduce the time to trading for the FIX Community.
The simplest use of FIX Orchestra will be to create an unambiguous specification for a service offering, replacing the ubiquitous PDF and Word documents that are not actionable. In its most extreme adoption level, FIX Orchestra can be used to automate the entire process of onboarding, normalizing, and validating disparate counterparty implementations.
As of Release Candidate 3, FIX Orchestra will be used as the basis for the re-engineering of the FIX Repository maintenance and publication system in 2018. By the end of 2018, all best practice documents will include a FIX Orchestra service definition. Independent Software Vendors, managed network providers, and bespoke implementations are encouraged to enhance their systems to consume FIX Orchestra service definitions.
Nirav Shah, Senior Vice President, Testing Tools Engineering, Itiviti, noted:
At Itiviti, we are closely involved in the area of standardisation and automation of Rules of Engagement. We are closely observing the progress of FIX Orchestra and evaluating how our platforms can consume FIX Orchestra files for automation of testing using an unambiguous specification of a service offering.
Damian Bierman, Head of Asia-Pacific, Portfolio Management & Trading Solutions, FactSet, Co-chair Global Technical Committee, FIX Trading Community, commented:
FIX Orchestra delivers major efficiencies to the counterparty onboarding process, and promises to bring benefits to the entire industry. Firms who adopt Orchestra will, for the first time, be able to define their service offerings in an entirely systematic way, allowing them to certify their flows faster and with greater accuracy, while significantly reducing the need for manual intervention. Ultimately, firms on Orchestra will be able to start trading faster, with greater ease and at lower cost than ever before. In that regard, FIX Orchestra represents one of the most exciting initiatives coming out of the FIX Trading Community today and proves yet again that the spirit of innovation within the community is alive and well, and focused, now as ever, on delivering solutions which are highly relevant to the challenges of the industry.
The next steps with this initiative will be to work with firms to get early adoption to drive and mature the standard.