The industry-driven standards body FIX is to search for ways to make digital assets more easy to adopt, partly through greater levels of interoperability.
A non-profit organisation, FIX’s digital assets & technology committee is to focus on three core challenges for the adoption and scalability of digital assets: integration and interoperability, regulatory guidance, and efficient use of DLT and smart contracts.
Competing digital asset-focused technologies is a challenge for attaining greater interoperability, as is competition between new technology and the traditional financial space.
FIX, which described the ascent of digital assets as “rapid”, said it invited members of its community to participate in finding a way through.
The focus on DLT and smart contracts aims to establish a common workflow design to efficiently use these technologies in an effort to solve existing trade processing workflow issues.
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Goncalo Lima, co-chair of the committee and also capital markets strategy lead at R3, a DLT provider, said: “Integration and interoperability are critical for asset tokenisation to scale up. Establishing a set of standards, such as the ones developed by FIX, will play a vital role in lowering barriers to adoption, facilitating innovation and ensuring the secure exchange of data and value across the ever-evolving capital markets landscape.”
Vince Turcotte, also co-chair, said: “Smart contracts, enhanced with the FIX protocol, will facilitate the settlement of both digital and traditional assets in a distributed ledger ecosystem. This is due to their programmable and interoperable nature as well as their ability to automate processes.
“We are entering a new era, marked by the emergence of new asset classes enriching traditional ones. We see a bright future ahead of us, with new and improved efficiencies and greater transparency across the financial services sector, benefiting all participants.”
