Industry Standards

Principal standards for STP based on open standards

1. FpML (Financial products Markup Language), based on XML, aims to standardize e-commerce activities in the field of financial derivatives, swaps, and structured products. All categories of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives will eventually be incorporated into the standard.
2. The Financial Information Exchange protocol (FIX) is a language that defines specific kinds of electronic messages (pre-trade and trade messages) for communicating securities transactions between financial institutions, primarily investment managers, brokers/dealers, ECNs, and stock exchanges. The most important feature of FIX that differentiates it from other protocols in the financial industry is that FIX is a connected, session-based protocol.
3. SWIFT is the industry-owned cooperative supplying secure messaging services and interface software to 7,000 financial institutions in 192 countries. It currently totally dominates the messaging services used by banks, brokers/dealers, and investment managers.
4. ISO 15022 XML is a result of the convergence of the most important messaging protocols in the financial vertical industry - FIX, FpML, and SWIFT. It is kind of a superset covering the domains of these existing messaging protocols.

These standards will work together with Web Services rather than in competition, as they address the orchestration layer of the Web Services stack. In other words, they provide the core layer that describes business process semantics for STP.

Research