One of the greatest trends in conventional financial markets is the push toward low latency, high availability services.  At the same time, regulatory change has created new legal data requirements. Present era protocols for market data distribution and client order management were not designed with these requirements in mind, and have begun to show their age.  IFEX offers the potential for normalization to a single protocol across all client channels, whilst preserving extensibility - no longer will you need to work through an external standards body or custom solutions in order to meet new protocol requirements.