Industry news & insights.

Automation and self-service now regularly feature in fix onboarding team’s annual objectives. What this actually means in reality is still quite nebulous and probably remains out of reach for most firms. Paul Whittington asks why onboarding is still so painful and discusses what can be done to tackle some of the common pain-points in the onboarding process.

FixSpec is excited to announce a new collaboration with CrowdX - the electronic solution for issuing and trading securities in privately held businesses - to design and implement market-leading onboarding processes for counter-parties.

I spend far more time thinking and talking about FIX documentation than… well pretty much anybody I’ve ever met. Despite being an outwardly-boring subject that is just too easy to swat away with objections like...

In a production support or analyst function, a key part of your role is to identify and resolve issues that may be stopping customers trade effectively day-to-day. As well as affecting their bottom line, your ability to troubleshoot, pinpoint, and resolve issues will have a direct impact on their perception of you as an organisation and the quality of your customer service.

One of the trends that we are seeing with more recent trading venues (which tend to be crypto exchanges), is that they are starting to offer both REST/Websocket and FIX interfaces. You might be asking why have both, and what’s the difference between them?

FIX Protocol has undoubtedly been a success story in the industry. When it was launched it was well ahead of its time but as the protocol matures, progress has understandably slowed. At a time when the wider API ecosystem is booming, Chris Lees asks whether the FIX Protocol can remain relevant for the long term.

Many firms that we speak to secretly struggle with FIX connectivity. Much like a duck moving across water, the internal reality of FIX connectivity is often quite different, which is why I suggest that firms secretly struggle with connectivity. For almost a decade, we’ve been talking to firms about what works and what doesn’t, and we’ve distilled these down into five principles for successful FIX connectivity.

Here at FixSpec we think of API documentation as a "contract" between two parties. It describes available messages, fields, and enumerations and workflows. It tells readers that if they send X in, they can expect Y in return. Customer-specific specs take this a step further by removing anything that a specific customer doesn't use, and extends the documentation to capture bespoke customisations and transformations. This has a number of benefits to both the sender and receiver.