The purpose of this exercise is to ensure the organisation is optimally structured to address the technical, business and regulatory issues impacting multi-asset trading across the global financial markets. This work specifically targets the increased use of standards, including the FIX Protocol, to deliver operational efficiency, increased transparency, and reduced costs and risk for all market participants. The restructuring comes as a follow on to a recent launch of their new website as well as an organisational rebrand.

As a result of the restructuring, the following new committees have been formed:

• Listed Products & Exchanges Committee - Maintaining the current FIX standards with respect to equities and listed derivatives, and overseeing the development and promotion of best practices for trading these products.
• OTC Products Committee - Overseeing standards development and strategic considerations given many of the common and overlapping initiatives of the OTC derivatives, fixed income and foreign exchange markets. With Dodd Frank and other regulatory changes involving multi-asset classes, leveraging the expertise of the three areas together is a practical step to address required developments.
• Global Buy-Side Committee - Delivering a focal point for the global buy-side community where informed debate around the business processes, messaging and technical standards affecting the community can take place and best practices, solutions and recommendations can be formulated and delivered. This builds on the success of recent regional buy-side initiatives.
• Global Member Services Committee - Managing the relationship with FIX Trading Community members and the wider industry. This includes promoting and growing membership, managing educational events, briefings and conferences, media relations and communication of FIX Trading Community activities and services.
• GSC StrStrategy Committee - Developing strategic plans focused on the future of the FIX standards, the organisation and electronic trading in general.

The Global Steering Committee (GSC) is still responsible for overseeing the FIX Trading Community by effectively managing the organisation's ongoing needs at both the strategic and operational level. The group includes representation from the leaders of each of FIX's four regional committees (Americas, Asia Pacific, EMEA, Japan) as well as leadership of the Global Technical Committee and the newly formed committees mentioned above. They recently held their annual meeting to review accomplishments from the past year and discussed goals for the FIX Trading Community in 2014 which include establishing and promoting the vision for the next generation of the protocol, publishing further release candidates of FIX for High Performance, distributing best practices for Transaction Cost Analysis, etc.

Courtney Doyle McGuinn, FIX Trading Community's Operations Director, stated, "The organisation went through a restructuring exercise about a decade ago and with FIX about to embark on its 20 year anniversary, it seemed the right time to realign. With so much change affecting the financial markets, it is absolutely imperative that the FIX Trading Community stay relevant across the asset classes, across the trading lifecycle and throughout the globe."