Financial Information Exchange

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.