FIX protocol standardizes trading communication (1992)
In 1992, a group of buy-side banks began building the Financial Information eXchange protocol to standardize trade messaging between buy-side and sell-side firms, replacing a tangle of proprietary interfaces.
FIX cut the cost and friction of electronic trading integration dramatically.
It became the default protocol for pre-trade and trade communication, proving that open standards beat proprietary silos in finance.
MCP is doing for AI data access what FIX did for trade messaging. Bloomberg, once a proprietary-silo incumbent, is now betting on the open standard rather than guarding a closed API.
