Global Digital Finance (GDF), a members’ association promoting digital assets in financial services, has unveiled a partnership with the FIX Trading Community, starting with a new joint working group seeking to enable the FIX-FinP2P Protocol Interoperability Alliance.
The initiative aims to upgrade existing financial infrastructure to interact with distributed ledger technology by facilitating interoperability across traditional financial systems and blockchain-based platforms. The bodies say the alliance is dedicated to enabling seamless messaging between traditional finance and digital securities, such as regulated institutional tokenised real-world assets including bonds, loans, securities lending, alternative investments, repo, and money market funds.
They add the integration leverages the strengths of the open-source FIX Trading Community and the open-source FinP2P tokenisation interoperability protocol, with Ownera as an integration partner.
The joint working group met for the first time on 20 June, and will operate over a four-month period, during which participating GDF and FIX community member firms and relevant blockchain technology firms will collaborate to test the integration of a FIX-based trading system with a FinP2P router in a sandbox environment.
The culmination of the Alliance’s efforts will be the publication of a white paper summarising the sandbox testing outcomes, insights gained, and recommendations for enhancing FIX to accommodate digital assets. Member firms will have the opportunity to review and contribute their expertise to this significant deliverable.
“GDF is delighted to partner with FIX Trading Community to support our large roster of member firms to jointly participate in the new FIX-FinP2P Protocol Interoperability Alliance,” says Madeleine Boys, GDF director of programmes and innovation. “Developed by the private markets digitisation steering group and governed by GDF under a Creative Commons license, we see this as the logical progression for the FinP2P tokenisation interoperability protocol and supports GDF’s mission and brand…driving best practice standards for digital assets.”
Anthony Woolley, co-chair of the GDF Tokenisation Forum and head of business development and marketing at Ownera, adds, “The biggest challenge facing tokenisation initiatives today is to connect market supply and demand at scale and make it easy for buy-side institutions to access the pipelines of high-quality assets now being tokenised by the sell-side. The FIX-FinP2P Alliance will be tackling that problem head-on by enabling institutions to use their existing FIX Gateways to connect to the world of tokenisation without having to worry about the expense and complexity of integrating technologies such as blockchain and digital custody into their existing systems.”
Finally, Jim Kaye, executive director at FIX Trading Community, says, “This Alliance is a natural partnership – both FIX and FinP2P were conceived as open peer-to-peer protocols and the potential for our community to use their FIX gateways to instruct the orchestration and settlement of tokenisation transactions over FinP2P will be a testament to the power and flexibility of the FIX messaging language.”.
