Javelin Develops FLIRT to Facilitate Electronic Trading Communication

Javelin is launching FLIRT, (financial language internet real-time trading) a new Internet infrastructure that it hopes will catch on as the industry's choice for communication between financial services players.

Currently, large firms might be making use of a FIX (financial information exchange) engine or server for their connectivity needs, but, according to President and CEO of Javelin Technologies George Kledaras, FIX engines reach their limit for connections somewhere in the hundreds while, with FLIRT, connectivity to trading partners can number in the thousands. In a world where the Internet is the business communication venue of choice, he adds, thousands of connections to liquidity is what the market needs.

"FIX was great for doing hundreds of connections," says Kledaras, "but it just does not scale and it's because of the session layer holding everybody back."

FLIRT functions as the session layer for the communication of information and can support a number of different messaging protocols such as XML (extensible markup language), FIX, FIXML or FPML (financial protocol markup language). The FLIRT sessions are HTTP-based and covered with a layer which provides for session-level acknowledgement that messages have been received by counterparties--something critical in financial services transactions.

"It's not just HTTP, it's the layer that you have to put on top that guarantees messages, a tag that says if you want to ensure if a message got from one place to another. This is they way to do it," says Kledaras.

Javelin hopes to turn FLIRT over to the FIX committee as an open standard (the organization that maintains integrity of the FIX standard) for safekeeping. Like FIX servers, which Javelin currently sells, they will have a FLIRT engine available for purchase sometime "in the next couple of months" says a Javelin spokesperson, with final pricing yet to be determined. Currently, Kledaras says, FIX servers start at around $20,000 and can go up to $1 million.

As for connectivity to the retail market, Kledaras, says that companies like E-Trade and other Internet-retail brokers should start thinking about making their applications FLIRT compatible through in-house development or a product from Javelin. He also has targeted vendors that make order management systems with the FLIRT engine, hoping they will be willing to integrate the server into their offering.

As with any new standard, the key to success is wide adoption and the key to wide adoption is success--obviously something difficult to achieve. Kledaras says the plan is to target applications such as Internet trading sites and financial services firms.

He says that FLIRT takes a large load off programmers and allows them to focus their energies in other directions. "Instead of using your own proprietary technology using HTTP, use FLIRT," says Kledaras, "we provide all the infrastructure and let people be creative with their applications on top of it."