From Principle to Practice: Open Standards and the UK bond Consolidated Tape
In a recent post, Why Standards Matter: Building a Consolidated Tape That Truly Serves the Market, we set out why open standards are essential if a consolidated tape is to meet its policy objectives. With the publication of FIX Trading Community’s Recommended Practices for the UK bond Consolidated Tape, we are now putting those principles into practice.
We confirm our intention to utilise these Recommended Practices as the official API of the UK bond Consolidated Tape.
Our approach reflects our belief that in regulated market infrastructure, technical design is not merely an implementation detail. It is a policy decision. By adopting FIX Trading Community’s open standards-based API, we have made a deliberate architectural choice that maximises support for fair access, proportionality and interoperability, while remaining grounded in standards with strong industry and regulatory governance.
Consolidated tapes as regulated market infrastructure
We do not view the consolidated tape as a proprietary platform competing for users against other market data solutions. In our view, it is a piece of system-wide market infrastructure, mandated to support transparency, price formation and confidence across the market.
That role has important implications for how contributors and users connect.
Where connectivity relies on bespoke or proprietary interfaces, the consequences are often increased onboarding costs, duplicated engineering effort across the market, reduced interoperability, and an increasing dependence on vendor-specific technology choices.
Over time, these effects can undermine the objectives that consolidated tapes are intended to achieve.
By contrast, open standards with established governance frameworks allow market participants to invest with confidence that connectivity will remain stable, transparent and interoperable as the regime evolves.
Practising what we preach
This work has been undertaken with a view to maintaining alignment with ISO 20022, recognising its strong standing with regulators and its role as the global reference model for financial semantics.
This approach delivers several practical benefits:
- Proportionate access: Contributors and users can leverage existing FIX and ISO-aligned infrastructure rather than build bespoke integrations.
- Operational resilience: Standardised semantics and message structures reduce ambiguity and support robust testing and incident management.
- Technology neutrality: Contributors and users are not required to adopt proprietary tooling to meet regulatory obligations.
- Regulatory credibility: Alignment with internationally governed standards supports consistency with other regulatory initiatives and supervisory expectations.
As the UK bond CT evolves, we are committed to maintaining this alignment, working through recognised standards bodies to ensure that any changes remain consistent with FIX Trading Community’s best practices, ISO 20022 and wider market practice.
Optional proprietary APIs and the governance challenge
It is sometimes argued that offering proprietary APIs alongside open standards provides flexibility. In the context of regulated infrastructure, this flexibility comes at a cost.
In particular, proprietary interfaces raise important questions about who controls semantic definitions, how changes are governed, and how alignment with external standards is maintained over time.
Where an interface is proprietary, responsibility for mapping to internationally recognised standards such as FIX Trading Community’s best practices documentation or ISO 20022 sits outside established industry governance frameworks. This can introduce duplication of mapping effort across the market, inconsistencies in interpretation, and uncertainty over long-term compatibility.
By contrast, open standards and best practices developed through bodies such as the FIX Trading Community benefit from structured governance and collective maintenance, including managed alignment with ISO 20022. This reduces fragmentation and ensures that changes are transparent, consultative and predictable.
For a consolidated tape, whose purpose is to simplify and standardise post-trade transparency, these governance considerations are central.
Governance, evolution and long-term resilience
Open standards are not static. They evolve through both industry-led and regulatory-led processes, subject to consultation, oversight and consensus.
In this context, our commitment to market participants and regulators is firm and unambiguous: we will undertake any future evolution of the UK bond CT contributor interface in collaboration with the FIX Trading Community, with continued regard to ISO 20022 alignment, and with the full engagement of our Consultative Committee. Our approach ensures that changes are transparent, are internationally consistent, and reflect the needs of the market.
In short, we will anchor any technical change in recognised standards governance rather than optional proprietary roadmaps.
Aligning implementation with regulatory intent
The UK’s wholesale markets reforms place emphasis on fair and effective access, proportionality, and competition based on innovation rather than control of infrastructure.
Technical design choices either reinforce or undermine those objectives.
By exclusively adopting open-source FIX Trading Community standards aligned with the ISO 20022 framework, and rejecting the use of optional proprietary APIs, we are ensuring that the UK bond CT implementation supports the policy intent of the regime and provides the simplest path for contributors to provide their data to the CT and for users to access the CT data.
Next steps
We will confirm our final API rules on 31 March 2026, following a review of our proposal by the ETS Connect UK Consultative Committee.
What remains constant is our commitment to exclusively utilise open, well-governed standards as the foundation of consolidated tape infrastructure. In a regulatory context, credibility depends on consistency between principle, governance and implementation. We intend to maintain all three.
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