About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

FIX Release of Orchestra Supports Standardisation of Rules of Engagement

Subscribe to our newsletter

The FIX Trading Community has published Release Candidate 3 of FIX Orchestra for public review. FIX Orchestra supports machine readable rules of engagement between counterparties and enables firms to define their service offerings in a systematic way, certify flows faster and with greater accuracy, and reduce manual intervention. It is designed to help the financial industry move further towards standardisation and automation of the rules of engagement and deliver efficiencies to the counterparty onboarding process.

The simplest use of FIX Orchestra will be to create an unambiguous specification for a service offering, replacing PDF and Word documents that are not actionable. In its most extreme adoption level, FIX Orchestra can be used to automate the entire process of onboarding, normalising, and validating disparate counterparty implementations.

Following publication of Release Candidate 3, FIX Orchestra will be used as the basis for the re-engineering of the FIX Repository maintenance and publication system in 2018. By the end of 2018, all best practice documents will include a FIX Orchestra service definition. Independent software vendors, managed network providers and bespoke implementations are encouraged to enhance their systems to consume FIX Orchestra service definitions.

Essentially, FIX Orchestra is a standard for the exchange of metadata about the behaviour of FIX applications that will allow adopters of not only FIX, but any messaging protocol, to describe their service offering. The ultimate goal is to bring the capability of ‘plug and play’ into the FIX ecosystem, improving operational efficiency and reducing the time to trading for the FIX Community.

Nirav Shah, senior vice president, testing tools engineering at Itiviti, says: “We are closely involved in the area of standardisation and automation of rules of engagement. We are observing the progress of FIX Orchestra and evaluating how our platforms can consume FIX Orchestra files for automation of testing using an unambiguous specification of a service offering.”

Damian Bierman, vice president, head of Asia-Pacific at Portware, and co-chair of the Global Technical Committee of the FIX Trading Community, adds: “FIX Orchestra delivers major efficiencies to the counterparty onboarding process and promises to bring benefits to the entire industry. Ultimately, firms on Orchestra will be able to start trading faster, with greater ease and at lower cost than ever before.”

The next steps of this initiative will be to work with firms on early adoption to drive and mature the standard.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Enhancing trader efficiency with interoperability – Innovative solutions for automated and streamlined trader desktop and workflows

Traders today are expected to navigate increasingly complex markets using workflows that often lag behind the pace of change. Disconnected systems, manual processes, and fragmented user experiences create hidden inefficiencies that directly impact performance and risk management. Firms that can streamline and modernise the trader desktop are gaining a tangible edge – both in speed...

BLOG

A-Team Group Announces Winners of the 2025 TradingTech Insight Awards USA

A-Team Group is delighted to announce the winners of the 2025 TradingTech Insight Awards USA, recognising the leading providers of trading technology, infrastructure, and consultancy services for capital markets across North America. This year’s awards highlight the technology providers driving innovation and performance across the trading lifecycle, from market connectivity and execution management to analytics,...

EVENT

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology London examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...