false

Foreign exchange is taking a front seat at FIX Protocol Ltd, where Steven Donovan and Jack Lemonik have been named co-chairs of the FIX Foreign Exchange Working Group. The chief investment-technology officer at Massachusetts Financial Services and chief technology officer at the FX electronic-trading platform FXall, respectively, will head up the group charged with expanding the Financial Information eXchange protocol to FX.

Lemonik explains that FX is a challenging area to implement FIX messaging because participants have developed a variety of workflows. "It's different than the equities market, where there is a standard way of doing things, because you're trading on an exchange," he says.

Lemonik says that his and Donovan's first goal is to take inventory of the current FX space, and create a gap analysis to determine what the current FIX FX-messaging standard permits, and what is necessary. Then, he says, the working group can act to update the old standard.

He adds, "We want to make this FX workflow a more collaborative and inclusive process for the whole community."