FPL is a non-profit organisation that owns the intellectual property rights of the Financial Information eXchange Protocol (FIX), which is a globally-recognised messaging standard enabling the electronic communication of pre-trade and trade messages between financial institutions, primarily investment managers, broker-dealers, ECNs and exchanges. FISD is a non-profit, member, roundtable organisation, representing firms within multiple constituencies in the securities industry focused on operational and policy issues related to financial information.

This agreement outlines a collaborative approach that will seek to further promote the use of standards to enhance straight-through-processing (STP), operational transparency, interoperability between market participants and regulators, and improved integration. These efforts will be of significant benefit to the financial services community, enabling even greater efficiencies and cost savings to be achieved.

This partnership will facilitate greater collaboration on a number of initiatives, including an agreement to work together with other industry bodies to provide leadership in the identification of reference and market data industry best practices for inclusion into international standards. In addition to this, FPL will actively contribute to the FISD Data Model Working Group which has been formed to consolidate and extend existing instrument data models into a framework that addresses the business issues exposed by the current credit crisis. These issues include the intermittent and inconsistent reconciliation of business and technical practices across merged and acquired platforms, and the relationship between streaming trade data and reference/proprietary information stored in multiple relational databases.

Commenting on this development Jim Northey, Co-Chair FPL Americas Regional Committee, and FPL's Industry Standards Liaison stated "We have had a strong relationship with the SIIA SIIA / FISD over the past few years. This agreement provides a formal grounding for even greater collaboration moving forwards, the result of which will be of significant benefit to all industry participants in the area of reference data standards and transparency."

Bill Nichols, FISD Program Director for Securities Automation Processing, added "As the distinctions between market and reference data become increasingly arbitrary, FISD and FPL are uniquely positioned to provide our members with a venue within which to cover all aspects of the landscape, from legal issues to down and dirty technical details. We are pleased to formalise our combined efforts and look forward to increased collaboration in several areas."