When surfing for car insurance or a tablet PC, shoppers generally do not care which website they use, as long as the service is quick, inexpensive and reliable. The same applies, increasingly, to the business of equity trading.
In financial centres across the world, a combination of deregulation and technology has transformed the landscape.
In New York, for example, where authorities began to encourage a migration of turnover to alternative platforms more than a decade ago, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have ceded almost half the market to rivals. A similar process has unfolded in Europe since the mid-1990s; Japan and Australia look to be heading the same way.