FIX Trading Community.com – FIX Trading Community, the non-profit standards body for the global financial trading industry, has unveiled the FIX Protocol for use for transmitting MiFID II Transaction Reports to Approved Reporting Mechanisms (ARMs).

Under MiFID II, all investment firms (including certain buy-side institutions) executing transactions in financial instruments are required to report details of their transactions to the national regulator as quickly as possible, and no later than the close of the following working day.

Although the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has defined a clear set of data standards to be used in transaction reporting by ARMs, there is no defined mechanism for the transmission of data to the ARMs themselves.

In response to this, the FIX Trading Community’s Global Technical Committee has undertaken to make any required modifications to the FIX Protocol to this end and provide mappings onto the ISO 20022 data standard required by ESMA.

Additionally, the FIX Trading Community will launch a version of its Market Model Typology (MMT), version 3.0 aimed at being MiFID II compliant.

The MMT is a data standard for trade classification, providing market participants with a uniform and normalised view of trading activity. MMT 3.0 has been developed to support the current draft MiFID II level 2 text on post trade transparency for both equity and non-equity instruments.

These initiatives have been welcomed by the financial trading community.

“We believe that harmonisation and standardisation where possible are key aspects of efficient and transparent markets. We therefore highly welcome this initiative by FIX Trading Community,” says Georg Groß, head of regulatory services at Deutsche Börse.

“We welcome FIX Trading Community’s commitment to create an industry wide standard,” says James Baugh, head of sales and marketing, LSE Equities and Turquoise.

“The ability for firms to connect to the Trax ARM via the common FIX language will be of great value as the industry prepares for regulatory change,” comments Len Delicaet, head of regulatory report strategy at Trax.