11 November 2026, London: The FIX Trading Community today announced the publication of its ETF Creation and Redemption Recommended Practices, a major milestone for the global ETF industry and the culmination of extensive collaboration among ETF issuers, authorised participants, market makers, service providers and technology platforms from North America, Europe and the UK and Asia-Pacific. Developed by the FIX ETF Working Group, the document establishes a standardised approach for the electronic communication of ETF creation and redemption workflows using FIX messaging standards.
Creation and redemption sit at the heart of ETF primary market activity. Yet despite the extraordinary growth of the global ETF industry, firms have often relied on a patchwork of proprietary workflows, bilateral integrations and manual processes to support interactions between authorised participants, issuers and service providers. The new Recommended Practices addresses this challenge by providing a common electronic communication framework, enabling firms to align to a standardised approach without reinventing workflows that already exist across the industry.
Over the years, ETF issuers and authorised participants have developed a range of platforms and connections to support creation and redemption activity,” said Emma Lokko, Co-Chair of the FIX ETF Working Group and Head of EMEA Market Structure, Susquehanna. “By establishing a common market standard, we’re simplifying connectivity and creating a foundation that allows participants to automate and scale these processes efficiently.”
Christopher Sabaitis, Co-Chair of the FIX ETF Working Group and VP at BlackRock, added: “What’s particularly powerful about this work is that it has been built by practitioners for practitioners. The working group brought together participants from across regions and across the ETF value chain to focus on practical implementation, not theoretical models. The result is a global standard that firms can use today, utilizing existing FIX Protocol capabilities and aligning with how the ETF market continues to evolve.”
The first phase of the initiative establishes a baseline framework covering core ETF creation and redemption workflows, including order submission, acknowledgements, approvals, status management, rejections and cancellations. The framework has been designed as a foundation upon which additional ETF workflows and use cases can be standardized over time.
“FIX Trading Community has always been at its best when it brings market participants together to solve industry-wide challenges,” said Jim Kaye, Executive Director of the FIX Trading Community. “This is exactly that kind of achievement. The ETF industry has grown into a global market of enormous scale, but creation and redemption workflows have remained fragmented in many areas. This Recommended Practice provides the industry with a common language and a common implementation approach. It removes barriers to adoption, reduces operational bottlenecks and creates the conditions for firms to scale their ETF businesses more effectively.”
The ETF Creation and Redemption Recommended Practice is available for download from the FIX Trading Community website: https://fixtrading.org/packages/rp-etf-ph1/.
Source: FIX Trading Community
