New York City-based Javelin Technologies has begun the distribution of its Flirt standard, billed as an Internet infrastructure for the universal communication of real-time trade data, irrespective of format.
The company is marketing Flirt (Financial Language Internet Real-time Trading) as a free, open Internet standard for electronic trading. Javelin describes the technology as "protocol friendly", meaning that trade information can be written in any data format (FIXml, FpML, XML, etc.) and reach its intended destination quickly and securely.
"We can pretend that FIX will solve all trading problems, but that would be to ignore the power of the Internet and those trading partners, like the retail investor for example, who cannot use FIX in its current form," says George Kledaras, president and CEO of Javelin Technologies. "Flirt solves the ubiquity issue, and creates more liquidity connections, something crucial for the industry moving forward.
Flirt uses the connection-less HTTP(s) as its transport layer and adds transactional integrity to create a lightweight state/session management capability, eliminating the need for traditional point-to-point connections - as is the case with a traditional FIX connection today - explains Kledaras.
"Javelin is positioned to help firms exploit the power of the Internet in a way the electronic trading marketplace has not seen," believes Rob Hegarty, research director with TowerGroup. "Flirt creates a universal infrastructure for electronic trading over the Internet, which will help the industry achieve greater market efficiency and allow access to greater pools of liquidity."