Governance

The APEX Standard is vendor-neutral and community-governed. Protocol changes follow an open RFC process overseen by the Technical Advisory Committee.

Technical Advisory Committee (TAC)

The APEX TAC has oversight of the protocol specification, conformance criteria, and governance process. The TAC ensures the standard remains vendor-neutral, technically sound, and responsive to the needs of both brokers and agent developers.

Read the TAC charter

RFC Process

All protocol changes go through the RFC (Request for Comments) process. This ensures every change is discussed, reviewed, and approved before becoming part of the specification.

Draft

Author submits RFC with rationale, spec changes, and migration impact

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Discussion

14-30 day community review period

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TAC Vote

Committee approval or revision request

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Implementation

Merged into the specification

Versioning

APEX Protocol uses semantic versioning with a 12-month deprecation window for breaking changes.

MAJOR Breaking changes to core spec

MINOR New capabilities, new profiles (backwards compatible)

PATCH Clarifications, bug fixes, editorial

Licensing

Specification

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0)

Free to use, share, and adapt with attribution

Reference Implementations

Apache License 2.0

Free to use in commercial and open-source projects

Contributing

We welcome contributions from brokers, agent developers, and the broader fintech community. Whether you're proposing a new profile, fixing a spec ambiguity, or adding conformance tests, the process is the same.

Read the contributing guide Join the discussion