Many of the business processes that are going to need to be changed in order to make use of the new Legal Entity Identifiers are already included in the FIX Protocol that many thousands of investments firms – buy-side and sell-side - use around the world.  The market practitioners that join in the continual development of FIX have already been working together addressing post-trade data requirements that are going to be relevant to CAT NMS.  And so, you might think that it would be logical that all of the “hubs” in financial markets that firms have to link to – exchanges, ECNs, MTFs, clearing houses, ticker plants, trade repositories, regulators, etc – would automatically implement FIX as the easiest and most cost-efficient way for their users to access the services that they provide to the industry.

But that’s not always the case.  When you ask an industry “hub” why it’s not using FIX - the data exchange standard that probably all of its users have already adopted – the answer tends to be “Because our users haven’t asked us to!”

I’ve often said that the word “Surely” is the most commonly-used word in the financial sector.  You’d think that – surely – any new hub that needs investment firms to connect to it would use FIX automatically - ?  Unless the users of that hub’s services make it clear that that’s what they want to happen, you might be surprised at what other more complex and costly alternatives such hubs may implement.

So when you’re talking to LOUs for LEIs, or to the CAT NMS implementer-to-be, remember to tell them that you want them to use FIX as an open and freely-available standard to help you connect to them – otherwise it will be your firm that will be paying for the consequences.