A fiduciary is someone who has undertaken to act for and on behalf of another in a particular matter in circumstances which give rise to a relationship of trust and confidence.
– Lord Millett, Bristol and West Building Society v Mothew
Meaning of ‘Fiduciary or Legal Support Services’
The concept of serving as a fiduciary is not new. In fact, centuries of law and business illustrate the importance of this concept which encompass trust and expert service underlying fiduciary relationships, have a long history within many different societies.
Historians have traced the roots of fiduciary principles back to the Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1790 BC) in Babylon. Hammurabi established one of the first written codes of law and set forth the rules governing the behaviour of agents entrusted with property, demonstrating fiduciary considerations at the very beginning of recorded legal history. Like the Code of Hammurabi, most primitive law deals with the entrusting of property for safekeeping, pledges of good faith and other indicia of trust.
Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC) consistently recognized that in economics and business, people must be bound by high obligations of loyalty, honesty and fairness and that society suffers when such obligations are not required. The Romans refined and formalized fiduciary law even further. In fact, the term “fiduciary” originated in Roman law, and means “‘a person holding the character of a trustee, or a character analogous of a trustee, in respect to the trust and confidence involved in it and the scrupulous good faith and candor which it requires.’
(Extracts from FIDUCIARY: A HISTORICALLY SIGNIFICANT STANDARD, BLAINE F. AIKIN, CFP®, CFA, AIFA®∗ KRISTINA A. FAUSTI, J.D., AIF, 2010-11)