Rapid Addition, a SWIFT partner in London, is making BizTalk work faster with FIX messages while preserving the order of message flow – essentials in financial services. But that’s just the beginning, said Kevin Houstoun, director of Rapid Addition, chairman of the FIX technology committee, and a consultant to several major banks.

“If you look at the cost of ownership around a FIX session, it is relatively high, while Web services are relatively low. I think in the long term we will migrate to a more IT industry standard way of doing things,” Houstoun said.

BizTalk allows firms to encapsulate business logic in a modern, open architecture and all the mapping is in XML.

“As FIX messages become XML and FIX becomes Web services, you can take your transport session, replace it with Web services, and you wouldn’t have to replace what you have in BizTalk,” Houstoun explained. “BizTalk gives you future proofing.” Rapid Addition has worked with Microsoft to benchmark BizTalk messaging at 30-40 milliseconds of latency, making it suitable for high volume trading.

Workflow is becoming increasingly important in financial services, he added. “We are constantly refining our business processes now, and an environment like BizTalk allows you to do that much more quickly. If you have to cut code around receiving order flow and routing it to a market, that could take three months. If you change orchestration in BizTalk, you can do it in a week,” he said.

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