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Financial Information Exchange

Webopedia Staff
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:43 am
Abbreviated as FIX, a vendor-neutral standardized message format protocol for describing real-time security transactions. FIX is a public-domain specification owned and maintained by FIX Protocol, Ltd. The protocol supports the following electronic conversations between brokers and other financial institutions:

  • Equity order submissions, cancellations and replacements
  • Equity execution reporting
  • Equity order statusing
  • Equity trade allocation
  • Indication of interest communication
  • Completed trade advertisements
  • Directed e-mail and news messaging

FIX is similar to OFX in that the two protocols are used to communicate financial information. However, OFX is focused more on retail transactions and is a query-response protocol much like HTTP while FIX is focused on institutional business and is a connected session-based protocol.