The specification is recommended for adoption by the FPL Market Data Optimisation Working Group, the team responsible for the development of Fast, and it is now publicly available and downloadable from the FPL website.

The Fast Protocol is a data compaction methodology that has been developed in response to ever-increasing electronic trading volumes and market data messaging rates. The release of Version 1.1 marks yet another significant milestone in the development of FIX Adapted for STreaming also known as the Fast Protocol.

The Fast Protocol was developed due to industry demand. Although the FIX Protocol had achieved wide adoption within the market, the traditional FIX format was proving unsuitable for high volume situations requiring greater bandwidth. Alternatives developed to address this market data problem have been only partially successful due to performance limitations with respect to compression and latency. The Fast Protocol standard solves this problem and allows costs to be shared among market participants.

By leveraging implicit tagging, field encoding and binary representation of data, the Fast Protocol optimises communication in the electronic exchange of financial data. Fast thrives on large quantities of data that share similarities in content and structure, presenting significant opportunities for the global capital markets.

With the support of industry sponsors, extensive testing was conducted on the Fast Protocol. The proof of concept tests that were completed, demonstrated that the Fast Protocol is capable of radically reducing message size and bandwidth utilisation by compressing FIX data feeds by up to 90% without negatively impacting latency.

The Fast Protocol has many uses, in addition to presenting a solution within the market data arena; it may also be applied to other areas demanding high compression and low latency communication such as high frequency trading, Direct Market Access and exchange interfaces.