FIX Trading Community, the non-profit, industry-driven standards body at the heart of global financial trading, today announced the publication of a document detailing extensions to the FIX Protocol to meet the requirements of MiFID II and MiFIR. The FIX Global Technical Committee has approved these changes and these are now available to use within the industry.
Members of the FIX Trading Community have been convening regularly since the summer of 2015 to address the impact to workflows that investment firms will face due to increased regulation. By walking through a number of different trading scenarios, members have been able to document what additional data will be required to be passed between investment firms and/or trading venues to meet MiFID II requirements. This additional data has been incorporated into the FIX Protocol and changes within this Extension Pack cover MiFID related items such as trade reporting requirements, venue waiver indicators, algorithm and trader IDs and short-sell marking.
Irina Sonich-Bright, Business Development AES Europe, Credit Suisse, Co-Chair of the FIX Trading Community MiFID II Transparency Working Group, noted, “It is a milestone that everyone in the industry has been waiting for. Some of the work is the result of the cross industry group’s collaboration too. There is still significant work to be done but there is enough information there to trigger feedback and move forward with the IT development.”
Hanno Klein, EMEA Chair, Global Technical Committee, FIX Trading Community, Senior Vice President, Deutsche Boerse, commented, “MiFID II and MiFIR require a lot of effort from the financial community for regulatory reporting. During the detailed analysis conducted by the various FIX working groups together with the FIX Global Technical Committee, it turned out that the majority of business requirements from ESMA were already covered by the FIX Protocol, building on the foundational work completed for Dodd-Frank Act reporting requirements. We were able to re-use many of the existing concepts and workflows and have so far not needed to add a single new message to the FIX Protocol. This significantly lowers the impact on existing users of the FIX Protocol when passing information to each other to allow regulatory reporting to ESMA.”
The FIX Protocol is a free and open standard available to all investment firms and trading venues. There are now three extension packs that are available for firms to download and implement as part of their work on MiFID II. These are as follows:
- EP206 – Clock synchronization
- EP216 – Post-Trade Flagging Obligations
- EP222 – Critical data requirements identified by the sub-working groups on transparency, and order data and recordkeeping
The FIX MiFID Working Groups are continuing to meet on a regular basis and address the following MiFID topics: Best Execution, Clock Synchronisation, Commission Unbundling, Microstructure, Order Data and Record Keeping, Reference Data and Transparency.
For more information please contact the FIX Trading Community Program Office at fix@fixtrading.org.
