The FIX Trading Community has told the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England that the binding constraint on tokenisation is neither the technology nor the rulebook, but the absence of common data standards — and the warning arrives just as retail brokers begin listing tokenised equities to customers who will never see a FIX message in their lives. The detail worth pausing on is that one of the gaps FIX names, common instrument identifiers, is a problem the industry supposedly already solved: the ISO 24165 Digital Token Identifier exists, and the European Securities and Markets Authority mandated its use under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation. That it remains on FIX’s list tells you the real gap is not naming the token. It is binding the token to the share it claims to represent.
FIX made the submission in response to the joint call for input on the future of tokenisation in UK wholesale markets, published by the FCA and the Bank of England on May 18, 2026 and closed to responses on July 3. The standards body’s published response argues that inconsistent data, workflows and market practice will slow adoption more effectively than any missing regulation.
The gaps FIX actually names
The list is a post-trade operations manager’s nightmare rather than a developer’s. FIX cites chain-to-chain connectivity, common instrument identifiers, and the missing plumbing between exchanges, custodians and digital asset platforms. It says there are no agreed standards for digital asset settlement instructions, no convention for wallet addressing, and no accepted method for mapping a wallet address to a legal entity. It flags the lack of a common taxonomy for corporate actions and coupon payments on wrapped instruments, and it notes there is no agreed encryption standard for digital asset transactions — a live risk of exposing client and other sensitive data.
“The business cases for tokenisation are both compelling and well advanced,” Jim Kaye, Executive Director at the FIX Trading Community, said of the response, pointing to post-trade and collateral management in particular. But a “lack of common data standards” could keep hampering adoption, and any framework needs input from both firms and supervisors to limit regulatory arbitrage. “Collaboration on this issue is absolutely fundamental,” Kaye said.
None of this is FIX arriving late. The body published Recommended Practices for Digital Asset Trading in 2022, has issued guidance on carrying tokenised assets over the FIX protocol, runs a Digital Asset and Technology Committee, and in 2024 launched the FIX-FinP2P Protocol Interoperability Alliance with Global Digital Finance, complete with a sandbox lab. The complaint is that the market has not converged on any of it.
Retail got there first
That matters because the retail end is no longer theoretical. Robinhood has issued more than 200 tokenised US stock and exchange-traded fund tokens to European customers on its own layer-2 chain, which now holds around $700 million in value. eToro has said it will tokenise the 100 most popular US-listed stocks and ETFs as ERC-20 tokens, Europe first. Kraken’s parent has pushed xStocks into Hong Kong, the UK and South Korea. On the institutional side, BlackRock has tokenised 12 money market share classes.
The custody and wrapper question FIX raises has already produced a supervisory incident. When Robinhood launched private-company tokens alongside its equity tokens, OpenAI publicly disavowed them and the Bank of Lithuania, Robinhood’s lead EU regulator, said it was awaiting clarification before it could assess the instruments’ legality. A holder of the SpaceX token owns a claim on units in a special purpose vehicle, not shares. That is exactly the wrapper disclosure FIX wants a field for, and no message format currently carries it. The same disclosure gap runs through institutional digital asset custody, and it is the fault line in the split between synthetic and directly held tokenised stock.
What late standards cost a broker
The integration arithmetic is unforgiving. A broker that connects to one venue over one FIX session today faces, in a standards-free tokenised market, a separate mapping per chain, per issuance platform and per custodian — an N-by-M build rather than a one-to-many one, with reconciliation breaks landing in operations rather than engineering. Every corporate action on a wrapped share becomes a manual exception until a taxonomy exists.
Expect the FCA and Bank of England feedback statement, and the joint roadmap it feeds, to lean on industry bodies rather than write message schemas themselves. Sarah Breeden, the Bank’s Deputy Governor for Financial Stability, framed the task as “moving from pilots to production,” with the Bank’s synchronisation service for settling in sterling central bank money targeted for 2028. That leaves roughly two years for FIX, ISO and the venues to converge — and retail order books running the whole time.
Rick Steves
Rick Steves has seen business and economics through many lenses. He joined the financial services industry in 2009, and has been a financial journalist since 2011. He holds a degree in Business Administration and has experience producing real-time news, from both buy-side and sell-side, as well as for retail traders, brokers and service providers. Steves' work has appeared in a variety of online publications including FX Street, NewsBTC, FinanceFeeds, and The Industry Spread. Rick has great interest in the dynamics of the trading industry. The never-ending clash between technology, economics, regulation, and more importantly, the people.
