FIX Releases New Technical Proposal for Orchestra System

Release Candidate 3 for FIX Orchestra is the third proposal for standards within FIX Orchestra and will be available for public comment.

FIX Orchestra, designed to be a machine-readable rules of engagement between counterparties, is expected to help add operational efficiencies within the FIX community by translating messaging protocols and help with the onboarding of counterparties. With Orchestra, implementations of the FIX protocol that can vary between some users are normalized and automated, cutting down on onboarding time.

The system will eventually bring plug-and-play capability into FIX and replace Microsoft Word documents and PDFs companies currently use.

Jim Northey, co-chair of the FIX Global Technical Committee, Americas region, says the newest proposal is to implement all FIX standards on Orchestra.

“We put out release candidates to get some feedback and testing from users before we really codify and mark something down. The importance of Release Candidate 3 is that based on feedback from Release Candidate 2, we’ve added a number of features and we’re going to implement all of the FIX standards on top of FIX Orchestra going forward,” Northey says. “What that means is that all the FIX standards will be available in the Orchestra format.”

Northey says the next steps will be determined by the FIX community as to whether a fourth proposal will be created or if the current one will be codified as a standard. He adds that FIX Orchestra can bring not just better operational efficiency to the 25-year-old protocol but in the long run can improve its value.

FIX Orchestra is part of a greater re-engineering of the FIX Repository maintenance and publication system planned for this year. Northey says adoption of FIX Orchestra right now is “negligible” but there is a proof-of-concept project with Portware and some sell-side participants to automate the exchange of definitions to release algorithms in the works, and a firm using Orchestra to generate data dictionaries.

“Adoption right now is negligible. The first major adoption will be within the FIX community and we have a proof of concept we’re starting with Portware and some of the sell side and that will be our first major foray into adoption which was enabled by Release Candidate 3,” Northey says. “We’re ready to help anybody adopt it today and we’ve built a number of open source projects to demonstrate the power of Orchestra. Last year everybody was working on Mifid II so I think now people have to time to work on improving operational efficiency, but up until January it was pretty much trying to achieve Mifid II [compliance].”