Gap Analysis Process Request - Actionable IOIs

#1

I’m unfamiliar with the process for raising additions to the FIX specification.

Is there documentation available for how this process starts? @hanno.klein - I know you’ve talked before about the Gap Analysis process - could you advise?

The background to this is to seek standardisation on how to denote Actionable.

Value Meaning

Industry FIX specs seem to differ. In general however there are two levels of support:

  1. Actionable or not. This is simply a boolean flag - 0/1 or Y/N or T/F. Just harmonising this part would be helpful.
  2. High/mid/low touch. Some providers go beyond actionable to support different levels of touch. I’m not sure if this is practically useful or not (or whether it’s best stored here) but it’s used.

Perhaps:

0 - Not actionable
1 - Actionable
2 - Actionable - High Touch
3 - Actionable - Mid Touch
4 - Actionable - Low Touch

Tag:

There’s broad current usage of 11001. Ideally this wouldn’t change but I know there are reserved and unreserved ranges.

#2

The Gap Analysis process is described in https://www.fixtrading.org/fix-processes-and-templates/. In general, you need to be a FIX member and join a working group or (sub-)committee. Maybe you should first look at extensions that were made around IOIs in recent years. I see IOIQualifier(104) where a fairly large number of valid values were added with EP225 (https://www.fixtrading.org/extension-packs/). This extension pack was initiated by the FIX EMEA Business Practices Sub-Committee in collaboration with AFME-IA. This would be the right committee to address this from a business point of view.

There is also some work that provided pre-trade guidelines (https://www.fixtrading.org/recommended-practicesguidelines/) called “Best Practices for Bonds - Pre-Trade Indications”.

Tag 11001 is in a range that can only be used internally and not for messages going out to an external party. Tags 10000 - 19999 are not defined or published by FIX in any way. Are these public specs you are talking about when you says “Industry FIX specs”? Could you post a few links here? It could very well be that the business requirements have already been covered by FIX in a standard way, just with a different terminology. I defer to IOI experts here and hope that there is somebody who can comment on this.