In both common and civil law jurisdictions, fiduciary duties (in the broadest sense) have long been recognized as a key element of the relationships between financial intermediaries and their customers. If one defines fiduciary relationships as including “important social and economic interactions of high trust and confidence that create an implicit dependency and peculiar vulnerability of the beneficiary to the fiduciary” (to borrow a definition suggested by Leonard Rotman),1 a broad range of financial services clearly match the description.2 From a comparative – and, particularly, from a Trans-Atlantic perspective – a useful starting point for analysis can be found in the statutory definitions of financial activities subject to specific prudential and conduct-of-business regulations. Wherever intermediaries hold money or other assets on behalf of clients in connection with transactions carried out on their behalf,3 or agree to provide expert advice with regard to investments4 or the conditions of a loan taken out by a customer,5 the existence of both a high level of trust and a high level of dependency and vulnerability on the part of the client is not just a characteristic feature of the intermediary-customer relationship, but provides the very rationale for public intervention, particularly in the form of conduct-of-business regulation. From a common law perspective, such activities usually will be qualified as agency relationships, which, given the functional nexus between fiduciary law and the law of agency in common law generally,6 helps explain why common law courts have frequently held that financial intermediaries are under fiduciary duties of loyalty and care, as well as duties to disclose certain information, to their customers.7 This doctrinal analysis can be backed up by an economic analysis of the agency problems between the intermediary (acting as “agent” for less knowledgeable investors) and the customer (as a “principal” who, almost by definition, can hardly protect himself against the fallout from information asymmetries and conflicts of interest on the part of the former).8 Even in civil law jurisdictions, where the legal basis for financial services contracts usually consists of, or is derived from, statutory categories of general contract law,9 the concept of fiduciary duties increasingly has come to be accepted as an analytical framework.10 For a number of reasons to be explored in detail later, both the substantive laws pertaining to the provision of financial services and, indeed, their doctrinal interpretation can be seen to have converged in a large number of jurisdictions over the last few decades.