FF.FAST SDK

FAST Protocol^SM

To cope up efficiently with the increased electronic trade and steeply rising market data message exchange rates, exchanges need to compress their market data and reduce bandwidth requirements. However, it adds considerable compressions and decompression overheads. To reduce these overheads and enable fast message delivery in a standardized format, the FIX Protocol Organization came up with FIX Adapted for STreaming (FAST) Protocol. The FAST Protcol provides a larger reduction in data size with a less overheads.

The FAST Protocol leverages the implicit tagging, field encoding and serialization in FIX Messages in order to radically reduce message size and bandwidth utilization. The FAST Protocol is based on the concept of data familiarity, which allows greater speed and efficiency than conventional compression utilities such as ZLIB and GZIP. FAST Protocol is now becoming the de facto standard for the high volume of Real-time Market data dissemination within the financial services industry.

Why FF.FAST SDK

FF.FAST SDK is the Software Development Kit from First Futures Software. It enables a high-performance implementation of the FAST Protocol^SM. Using FF.FAST SDK, financial institutions can deliver FAST encoded messages to their counterparties or subscribe to market data feeds that use the FAST Protocol, decode it and deliver the decoded data directly to their market data platforms.

For optimum performance, the FF.FAST SDK library is implemented in C++. It provides a simple programming interface that enables encoding and decoding of FAST messages.

FF.FAST SDK has been successfully tested with the FIX and FAST market data format of Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). The CME Group is FIX compliant and uses FAST for their market data distribution in order to achieve reduced latency at both average and peak message rates.