In his 12 years at Deutsche Börse, Werner Seifert, the group's jazz-loving chief executive, achieved a lot. The former management consultant took what was a tired Frankfurt stock exchange and built it through organic expansion, bold acquisition and a stock market listing of its own into the world's biggest listed exchange group.

Mr Seifert, a formidable intellectual, had a vision for a more efficient market but increasingly in recent years his ideas clashed with those of his shareholders.