07 February 2025
Ahighly acclaimed retail and corporate bank needed to ensure that counterparties continued to consider it a trustworthy and desirable trading partner. Many of the bank’s counterparties execute trades via algorithms that use the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol.
For sales and trading desks, staying competitive depends on two key factors: an attractive commission rate on executed trades; and rapid, reliable connectivity. Reliability is necessary to win business from trading counterparties and fast connections enable traders to quickly seize market opportunities and execute at the best price; while unreliable connections can take a business off the market and impact both revenue and reputation.
As such, FIX connectivity must be continually reliable, with minimal latency throughout the lifecycle of a trade message. Thus, to remain competitive and uphold a business’s reputation as a trusted trading partner, Applications and Trading Support teams require robust FIX monitoring. They must be able to measure FIX connections, proactively manage potential risks, and minimize time to remediation in case any issues occur.
Improving FIX connectivity
Knowing that top-notch technology performance is a must-have, the retail and corporate bank’s Applications Support team chose ITRS Geneos to further improve its FIX connectivity.
Offering next-gen application monitoring and observability, Geneos keeps mission-critical IT estates always-on with real-time alerts and predictive issue detection. Trusted by more than 90% of Tier 1 firms, Geneos monitors business transactions all the way down to raw machine data.
The project was a roaring success, and today, the Applications Support team uses Geneos to proactively monitor FIX connections, keeping the turnaround time under a benchmark of 280ms to stay competitive in the trading landscape. The monitoring data feeds a real-time view of each counterparty connection’s status, which the Applications Support team displays on a dashboard in the Operations Center.
Geneos also delivers continuous actionable insights specific to each FIX connection and can provide real time alerts. The tool tracks the latency of all FIX sessions and provides several levels of insights. These include average latency over multiple time windows (present, 5mins, 30 days) and latency to specific counterparties highlighting acceptable differences due to factors such as geography.
Consequently, the Application Support team can proactively identify and mitigate potential issues with FIX connections without relying on a counterparty to alert them. This reliance would introduce extensive human intervention to the remediation process, making mean time to recovery (MTTR) up to 15 minutes. In comparison, proactive FIX monitoring reduced this time to less than 1 minute.
Unparalleled insights
As a result of the implementation, Geneos’ real-time monitoring capabilities allow the bank to ensure minimal FIX latency. It also offers unparalleled levels of insight into live FIX connections. The active dashboard guarantees immediate response and expedites the potential time to remediation.
A competitive FIX connection turnaround time of
ITRS continues to be an instrumental component of the bank’s operations and Geneos delivers game-changing capabilities that make FIX connectivity a competitive differentiator.
