Bob Lamoureux is a bit of a legend in the connected world of FIX, the electronic trading protocol he co-authored in the early '90s while working at Fidelity Investments. FIX (Financial Information eXchange), deployed widely across the global financial services industry, is used both by buy side institutions and sell side brokers/dealers in the financial markets to facilitate order execution.
For the last few years, Lamoureux has been consulting for large financial organizations in the Boston area with his firm, Advanced Technology Advisors, on various mission-critical projects. Recently, when implementing an order management platform for one of his clients, he ran into a problem: some of the trades sent to his clients missed settlement date information. While settlement dates can be easily calculated from the trade date, the organization needs a solid and reliable market calendar to do so effectively.
Rather than build one of his own (which he has done a few times in previous lives), Lamoureux found it easier to use the XigniteExchanges service. With just a few minutes of programming, Lamoureux was able to retrieve an accurate settlement date. The thought of never having to maintain that calendar was by-far the best thing. "That in itself made the service worth it," Lamoureux says. "Anyone on Wall Street would be silly to build and maintain yet another exchange calendar. XigniteExchanges is just perfect for this type of application."