Long-Term Stock Exchange Funding, Investors & Competitors

PT Takjub Finansial Teknologi operates Ajaib, an Indonesian online stock trading and investment platform founded by Stanford classmates Anderson Sumarli and Yada Piyajomkwan. The Jakarta-based platform lets Indonesian investors trade traditional financial products alongside digital assets, and it reached unicorn status in 2021.

Charles Schwab is one of the largest retail-oriented financial-services companies in the US, with $11.9 trillion in client assets across its brokerage, banking, asset management, custody, financial advisory, and wealth-management businesses at the end of 2025. While best known for its retail brokerage offering, Schwab generates the lion’s share of its revenue and profits through its Charles Schwab Bank and asset management segments. The firm is a dominant player in registered investment advisor custody, with over 40% market share, and has recently pushed into wealth management with robo-advisory, direct indexing, and other managed-investment solutions.

Robinhood Markets Inc is creating a modern financial services platform. It designs its own products and services and delivers them through a single, app-based cloud platform supported by proprietary technology. Its vertically integrated platform has enabled the introduction of new products and services such as cryptocurrency trading, dividend reinvestment, fraud detection, derivatives, fractional shares, recurring investments, and others.

Based in Chicago, CME Group operates exchanges giving investors, suppliers, and businesses the ability to trade futures and derivatives based on interest rates, equity indexes, foreign currencies, energy, metals, and commodities. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange was founded in 1898 and in 2002 completed its IPO. Since then, CME Group has consolidated parts of the industry by merging with crosstown rival CBOT Holdings in 2007 before acquiring Nymex Holdings in 2008 and NEX in 2018. In addition, the company has a 27% stake in S&P Dow Jones Indices, making the Chicago Mercantile Exchange the exclusive venue to trade and clear S&P futures contracts. Through CME's acquisition of NEX, it also expanded into cash foreign exchange, fixed-income trading, and collateral optimization.

Intercontinental Exchange is a vertically integrated operator of financial exchanges and provides ancillary data products. Though the company is probably best known for its ownership of the New York Stock Exchange, which it acquired in 2013, ICE operates a large derivatives exchange, too. The company's largest commodity futures product is the ICE Brent crude futures contract. In addition to the exchanges business, which is about 54% of net revenue, Intercontinental Exchange has used a series of acquisitions to create its mortgage technology business (22% of net revenue) and fixed-income and data-services segment (24% of net revenue).

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing is a vertically integrated securities exchange business offering listing, data, trading, clearing and settlement services across equities, debt and derivatives. HKEx, like Hong Kong itself, functions as a gateway between China and the rest of the world. HKEx serves as a preferred listing venue for Chinese companies outside of China and, through the Connect Scheme, offers two-way trading for a growing group of financial products with the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

CITIC Securities Co Ltd is a brokerage and investment group that provides brokerage, underwriting and sponsoring, proprietary trading, investment banking, asset management, investment advisory, Margin financing and securities lending, Stock option market-making, and other services. The company has five reportable segments, namely Investment Banking, Brokerage, Trading, Asset Management, and Others. It derives maximum revenue from the Trading segment.

Deutsche Boerse is a financial exchange company headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany. The company primarily generates revenue through its Eurex and Clearstream segments. Eurex allows for the trading and clearing of derivatives. Clearstream offers custody and settlement services for domestic and international securities, as well as collateral management services. Other segments include Xetra, which generates revenue through trading and clearing cash equities, STOXX (an index business), and several others.

London Stock Exchange Group is a fully integrated financial exchange company covering the financial market value chain from primary and secondary markets across multiple asset classes over data, index, and analytics down to clearing and post-trading reporting. With the acquisition of Refinitiv, LSEG generates about two thirds of its revenue from data and analytics including its FTSE Russell and WM/Refinitiv benchmarks as well as data feeds and terminals. The group is also a majority shareholder in Tradeweb, one of the dominant global fixed-income trading venues, as well as LCH, the largest clearinghouse for over-the-counter swaps globally.

Founded in 1971, Nasdaq is primarily known for its equity exchange, but in addition to its trading business (about 22.5% of sales), the company sells market and financial data to investors, offers Nasdaq-branded indexes, and lists companies through its capital access segment (42.5%). Nasdaq's newest segment, financial technology, was primarily constructed through the acquisitions of Verafin and Adenza and has expanded the company into capital management, financial crime, and regulatory compliance software (35%) as it seeks to become a diversified technology company.

Founded in 2012, Coinbase is the leading cryptocurrency exchange platform in the United States. The company intends to be the safe and regulation-compliant point of entry for retail investors and institutions into the cryptocurrency economy. Users can establish an account directly with the firm, instead of using an intermediary, and many choose to allow Coinbase to act as a custodian for their cryptocurrency, giving the company breadth beyond that of a traditional financial exchange. While the company still generates the majority of its revenue from transaction fees charged to its retail customers, Coinbase uses internal investment and acquisitions to expand into adjacent businesses, such as prime brokerage and data analytics.

Guotai Haitong Securities Co Ltd Formerly Guotai Junan Securities Co Ltd is engaged in providing brokerage services, corporate finance, asset management services, and loans and financing services. Its segments include wealth management, investment banking, institutional and trading, investment management, international business, and other segments. The company derives the majority of its revenue from the institutional and trading segment, which consists of research, institutional brokerage, trading and investment, and equity investment.

Interactive Brokers is a large, automated, retail and institutional brokerage that boasted nearly $780 billion in customer equity at the end of 2025. The company cut its teeth as a market maker, introducing US financial markets to automated and algorithmic training before expanding into brokerage services in 1993. The firm has a wide-ranging client base, with its best-in-class order execution and extremely low margin lending rates catering to a sophisticated audience of hedge funds, proprietary traders, and introducing brokers that account for about 45% of the firm’s commissions. With operations spanning more than 160 electronic exchanges, 36 countries, and 28 currencies, Interactive Brokers caters to a global clientele, with more than 80% of active accounts sitting outside the US.

Founded in 1973, Cboe controls the largest option exchange in the US, which provides around 60% of the firm's revenue. The company is best known for its proprietary S&P 500 and VIX index options, which it offers through an exclusive contract with S&P Global. The firm moved into US and European equities through the $3.4 billion acquisition of BATS in 2017. Cboe has continued to look to expand internationally, using acquisitions to build a presence in both Canada and Australia.

LPL Financial is the largest US independent broker-dealer, with more than 32,000 financial advisors affiliated with its platform and roughly 11 million customer accounts at the end of 2025. The firm earns the bulk of its profit from interest income earned on client cash balances and from advisory fees and commissions tied to the $2.4 trillion in assets under management or advisory on its platform at year-end 2025. LPL specializes in the provision of turnkey wealth management services for affiliated independent advisors, but maintains a diverse array of affiliation modalities, running the gamut from more traditional employee models to a pure RIA custody approach. It earns tuck-in revenue from recordkeeping fees and the provision of software tools and services to its advisor base.

Crypto.com is a Singapore-headquartered cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2016. The platform facilitates buying, selling, and trading more than 350 cryptocurrencies and tokens across spot, derivatives, and perpetual futures markets. Users access on-chain staking for assets like Ethereum and Cosmos, earn interest through flexible savings accounts, and build diversified portfolios with crypto baskets tracking indices such as DeFi or metaverse sectors. Crypto.com issues the Crypto.com Visa Card available in multiple tiers with cashback rewards up to 8 percent. The company powers fiat on-ramps in over 30 countries including USD, EUR, and GBP pairs. It operates the Cronos blockchain for DeFi applications and runs an NFT marketplace featuring collections from artists and brands. Crypto.com holds naming rights to Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles and partners with Formula 1.

Clear Street is a New York-headquartered financial services firm modernizing brokerage clearing and custody. Founded in 2018, the company built a cloud-native platform handling equities, options, fixed income, and futures across global markets. The system supports multi-currency settlements and real-time risk management for institutional clients. Clear Street replaces legacy mainframe infrastructure with scalable AWS-based technology. The firm serves hedge funds, market makers, and prime brokers in the United States and Europe.

FalconX is a San Mateo-headquartered digital asset prime brokerage serving institutional clients with trading execution, financing, credit, and custody across 200 cryptocurrencies. Founded in 2018, it connects to 80 exchanges for aggregated liquidity and employs quantitative models for optimal pricing in spot, derivatives, and OTC markets. Hedge funds, market makers, and family offices rely on its API-driven platform for portfolio management in global crypto markets.