ABSTRACT
In Italian city states of thirteenth century, people brought their coins to a banker primarily for the safe keeping of these monies, but also so that the banker could facilitate, upon a transfer order by his client, cross-border transfers of this cash. From a private or commercial law perspective, custody of money and securities has not been the subject of European harmonisation. Brazilian and Chinese law represent examples of jurisdictions where client accounts are segregated on all levels of the custody chain. Thus, these systems qualify financial intermediaries as mere account operators and regard securities custody as depositum. It requires imagination to realise that the above differences in legal regimes may give rise to legal disputes as to ownership and entitlement to assets, and complicate transfers or rapid return of the assets to clients as the Basel committee on banking supervision warned. Securities custody has been the subject of international harmonisation initiatives, many of which have not yet been enacted.
