The future of the world’s stock exchanges faces some big challenges in the wake of the global financial crisis, according to the Bermuda Stock Exchange’s (BSX) CEO Greg Wojciechowski.Not least among those are regulatory change and market fragmentation, in addition to other issues such as mergers, as exchanges are forced to look at the way they do business and the shifting landscape around them.Mr Wojciechowski, who was attending the 51st World Federation of Stock Exchanges annual general meeting in South Africa last week, made the comments in an interview with Summit TV.“Regulatory change and trading mechanisms are forcing us to look at how we can continue to offer the services that we have in the past because exchanges are absolutely essential to the well-being of an economy,” he said.Meanwhile the tightening grip of the economic crisis has resulted in tremendous political pressure to close down the cash markets, said Mr Wojciechowski.“At that point the heads of the exchanges were adamant that our mechanisms were working properly at that point we were one of the only mechanisms providing liquidity to the global marketplace.”Mr Wojciechowski said that the stock exchanges were very aware of their societal obligations to ensure there was always a framework, and to mitigate systemic risk.“We are always balancing the cost of continuing to provide the structures for new competition and price discovery, with regulatory oversight we are all having to take a hard look at how we do things,” he said.He said that fragmentation of the markets on the one hand was being accompanied by consolidation on the other side, with new entrants being overshadowed by big mergers such as the German and New York Stock Exchanges.“These appear to be competing forces but the one is the pre-cursor to the other. We have new competitors coming into the market which is fine as that’s a competitive source but they don’t have the same levels of overhead required to operate traditional exchange mechanisms that are pretty substantial,” he said.