TransactTools, the leading provider of enterprise solutions for electronic trading connectivity, announced today that the market-leading TCM connectivity platform now includes native support for FAST.
This makes TransactTools the first and only financial messaging vendor to support the new standard.
"We believe FAST is the most significant new development the FIX world has seen in many years," said Sam Johnson, TransactTools CEO. "With the support of major industry players behind it, FAST will become the open, standards-based alternative to proprietary messaging for high-volume, low-latency applications like market data and DMA."
FAST grew out of proof-of-concept work done by the FPL-sponsored Market Data Optimization Working Group. Led by a handful of Chicago-based exchanges including CME and Archipelago, the working group created an open specification for compressing and optimizing FIX messages. Initial pilots show up to eighty percent average compression rates, and up to 700,000 messages per second in market data applications. TransactTools has been working with the group to apply these techniques to traditional FIX messages and sessions.
David Litner, VP Engineering, commented, "The performance improvements are remarkable and the approach is completely open and standard. Just like FIX, FAST is a public specification that can be implemented by anyone. Native support in our server, which already outperforms other products for standard FIX, provides maximum efficiency and flexibility - FAST is a configuration option that can be switched on or off for any FIX session."
Matt Simpson, Associate Director, Electronic Trading Architecture for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and a leader of the working group explained, "While the FAST Protocol has been developed to help alleviate the urgent industry need of market data overload, it can also be extended to provide optimization in other venues. To this end, FIX is looking at ways to improve the efficiency of point-to-point interactions through the use of FAST. The FAST Protocol offers speed and efficiency in the form of an open standard and should become a core building block of data transfer."
"We're not filing patents and we're not implementing proprietary messaging interfaces," Johnson said. "Our approach has always been to work with our customers instead of against them. That means embracing open standards because it's the long-term best thing for our industry." TransactTools is already working with a number of leading exchanges on approaches for integrating FAST support for market data and trading.