This Standard establishes a method for the compression@ decompression@ and related control functions associated with the electronic transmission of financial data. Also provided by this Standard are techniques to allow for the optimization of the compression function and to prevent the expansion of data. This Standard is applicable without regard to the actual format or content of the data@ and can be used on many diverse types of financial data. The algorithm in this Standard may be effective in compressing data such as image or digitized audio@ but other methods are typically used in these applications.