FIX Trading Community and Global Digital Finance (GDF) have established a joint working group which is set to enhance FIX’s reach to connect its community to the tokenised assets space.
Anthony Woolley
“This initiative aims to upgrade existing financial infrastructure to seamlessly interact with distributed ledger technology by facilitating interoperability across traditional financial systems and blockchain-based platforms,” according to both organisations.
Specifically, the two entities coming together will enable the FIX-FINP2P Protocol Interoperability Alliance. This will allow firms to use their existing FIX gateways to connect to the tokenisation space and avoid expenses and complexity.
The initiative is set to allow for seamless messaging between traditional finance and digital securities, specifically with regards to: bonds, loans, securities lending, alternative investments, repo, and money market funds.
Jim Kaye, executive director of FIX Trading Community, said: “This Alliance is a natural partnership – both FIX and FinP2P were conceived as open peer-to-peer protocols and the potential for our community to use their FIX gateways to instruct the orchestration and settlement of tokenisation transactions over FinP2P will be a testament to the power and flexibility of the FIX messaging language.”
The working group first met on 20 June and is set to operate over a four month period. Following this, a whitepaper will be published summarising testing findings and key insights and recommendations for enhancing FIX as it seeks to accommodate digital assets.
Speaking to the importance of this move, Anthony Woolley, co-chair of the GDF tokenisation forum and head of business development and marketing at Ownera – an integration partner – explained that the biggest challenge needing to be addressed by tokenisation initiatives currently is to “connect market supply and demand at scale and make it easy for buy-side institutions to access the pipelines of high-quality assets now being tokenised by the sell-side.”