Welcome to the latest edition of At the Forefront: Fintech Conversations!
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In this episode, Forefront Head of Content Sam Belden is joined by George Rosenberger, Americas Regional Committee Co-Chair at the FIX Trading Community and SVP, General Manager of NYFIX at Broadridge, ahead of FIX’s Americas Trading Conference in New York on October 29. George previews a program built around a practical question: how market structure changes actually get implemented across the systems and workflows of the buy side, sell side, exchanges, technology providers and regulators. He explains that this has always been FIX’s core role: serving as the standardization layer that removes ambiguity and lets firms reliably exchange information as new market structure ideas move from strategic, commercial or regulatory discussion into production.
That operational lens shapes George’s view of 24-hour trading, which he frames as an ecosystem change rather than an extension of exchange business hours. Longer trading days touch the entire trade life cycle, including liquidity formation, price discovery, surveillance, risk controls, clearing and settlement, reference data and corporate actions. Even a continuous market still needs a defined end of day and reconciliation window. George expects the harder questions to be about market quality: how liquidity behaves across time zones, how investors understand the conditions they’re trading in, and who is accountable when something goes wrong.
George applies the same thinking to two other fast-moving areas on the agenda. With prediction markets, he notes that the industry is still working out where gambling ends and trading begins. He argues that the path forward runs through the same fundamentals that have underpinned equity markets for decades: clear product definitions, transparent rules, sound risk management, reliable pricing and reference data, and appropriate surveillance. On ETFs, he describes how the create-and-redeem process has moved from manual spreadsheets to full automation over FIX between issuers, authorized participants and their counterparties. That shift improves efficiency and access to liquidity while cutting out the risk of manual error.
The conversation then turns to AI and the convergence of traditional and decentralized finance. George observes that AI is already supporting research, liquidity discovery and idea generation but hasn’t yet made its way into trading models themselves. Getting there will require guardrails. One example is a potential FIX tag that identifies whether an order originated with a human or a model, so counterparties can apply the right risk controls and firms can maintain an audit trail covering governance, explainability and human review. On TradFi and DeFi, he names interoperability as the central issue, warning that without industry-wide standards, multiple token IDs for the same underlying security would create a mapping nightmare. He closes on the thread connecting every session: innovation only matters if it can be implemented, and FIX’s job is to take industry decisions from concept to reality in a way that’s repeatable and built on a common standard.
For more conversations with fintech and capital markets leaders, explore the At the Forefront podcast archive or our YouTube channel.
To learn more about the Americas Trading Conference and register, visit fixtrading.org.
TLDR
4:30 – Why 24-hour trading is an ecosystem change, not just longer market hours
7:00 – Prediction markets, ETFs and the fundamentals that make new markets work
10:30 – Moving AI from experimentation to practice, and why order origin may need a FIX tag
14:00 – Bridging TradFi and DeFi through interoperability and common standards