Industry news & insights.

A good process can work hand-in-hand with software. A poor process creates friction between person and tooling and hinders effective automation. But how do we reach a point of confident automation?

We’ve spoken to numerous firms who have a desire to enable customers to self-serve onboarding and ongoing integration. More often than not, however, it hasn’t been pursued as it is seen as too challenging a project, or are unaware that the tools to do so exist in the first place.

In conversation with UK customers so far this year, one topic keeps coming up time and again - IR35. While this isn't a new rule (its been around since 1999), a new update coming in April will create a significant problem for UK firms employing FIX consultants across their onboarding teams.

Certification shouldn’t be a painful process, but we appreciate it can be if the different elements of the project don’t come together. Our platform can significantly reduce the number of errors during that process, and therefore the time spent problem-solving connectivity issues. But, when it comes to re-certification, this is where the fixspec platform continues to add significant value beyond the initial onboarding project.

Specifications are a fundamental part of connectivity onboarding. Despite being the key to accurate and performant customer certification, they are often overlooked as a static PDF that nobody really “owns”, and nobody wants to invest time in. But why do so many firms overlook specs and fail to manage them in a way that can make them reusable?

Building on the successes of core testing, certification, and digital specification tools, “Flow” allows connectivity teams to map out multiple workflows, automate repeatable processes, and manage onboarding timelines on a visual, easy-to-reference dashboard.

Whether you deal with FIX or propreitary protocols, and whether you work for a vendor, trading venue or broker, this series is for you. If you'd like to receive a monthly newsletter of these on-boarding updates, then please leave your email at the end of this post (we promise to only send you these updates - no spam and we won't give or sell your email to anyone else).

Whether you deal with FIX or propreitary protocols, and whether you work for a vendor, trading venue or broker, this series is for you. If you'd like to receive a monthly newsletter of these on-boarding updates, then please leave your email at the end of this post (we promise to only send you these updates - no spam and we won't give or sell your email to anyone else).

Sometimes writing and maintaining documentation can feel pointless, especially for banks which routinely accommodate customers requests to either default or override their standard API messages. After a while, the internal perception becomes that the "formal" FIX specification has little value; as something that simply represents the starting point for discussion as opposed to a firm document.

This post is primarily written for readers what are part of the onboarding team who are either upgrading existing customers to new API functionality or conforming new customers to your trading service or market data platform.