FIX founds global post-trade working group

The new group will bring together the existing Americas Buy-side Post-Trade Working Group with the EMEA Post-Trade Working Group, in addition to welcoming participation from members based across the Asian and Japanese markets, providing a forum where the business and regulatory challenges impacting the post-trade environment can be effectively addressed through the use of standards.

The decision to merge the two existing groups was taken following the extensive global collaboration already taking place. Group participants also recognised within the business community that knowledge sharing on post-trade and collaborating on the best way to address market needs on an international scale will generate the strongest recommendations, which are both relevant domestically but also work well world-wide.

As the industry globally seeks to further reduce inefficiencies, operational risk and unnecessary costs in post-trade processing, there has been a determined drive to increase the use of standards in this area. These requirements led to the recent release of updated guidelines explaining how FIX could be used for equities post-trade processing in May of this year.

The guidelines were originally developed by the Americas Buy-side Post-Trade Working Group, however to ensure that they could be applied globally, feedback was secured from market participants active in different regional markets and across additional industry sectors, such as the sell-side and vendor communities. This included a recent review by the EMEA Post-Trade Working Group, which confirmed that there were no geographical-based buy-side workflow differences, although there were some European market-based differences. To aid with European implementations, the guidelines have now been enhanced to explain how the existing workflows can be applied to these variances, through additional diagrams.

The new Global Post-Trade Working Group has been formed in recognition of the industry-wide benefit that g global insight and feedback presents in the development of work in this space. The new group will focus on building on the existing guidelines now being adopted by many major buy and sell-side firms, and provide further recommendations for how FIX can be used for post-trade processing across the major asset classes.

To manage this next stage of work, four sub-groups have been formed looking at the following areas:
• Fixed Income
• Equity Swaps
• Foreign Exchange
• Equity Options

The new group will be jointly chaired by Dave Tolman of Greenline Financial Technologies, Laura Craft of Traiana and David Pearson of Fidessa Group. The group welcomes participation from all FIX Trading Community member firms. To join please visit the working group's page on the new website and select 'Request to following working group' from the menu featured on the left-hand side of the page.

If you are interested in learning more about FIX Trading Community's work in post-trade join the Post-Trade Breakfast Briefing in London on October 2nd. Additionally, for the latest information regarding FIX Trading Community's work in the post-trade environment and industry commentary, please visit the Hot Topics: Post-Trade section of the website.