In general, you'll find that traditional banks offer
a much wider range of financial services than online companies like Discover, including loans, mortgages and retirement accounts.
In addition, mergers and acquisitions within the
financial services sector, relaxation
of regulations to permit a
wide range of «specialized» exchanges (including some which are set up to allow computers to trade with each other), and systems allowing big institutional investors like banks, mutual funds, pension funds and money managers to exchange shares directly have pretty
much eliminated the differences between the exchanges.