This is a normative research on how best to structure financial regulatory agencies and principles consistently with the core objectives of financial regulation in such a manner that can yield an effective regulatory framework for Nigeria. It moves forward the debate on what an effective financial regulatory ought to be relative to a country's national context, its developmental stage and how international financial regulatory best practice principles can be 'woven' into the design of an enduring regulatory architecture in a developing economy such as Nigeria. The thesis contributes to three areas namely: the literature on comparative financial regulation, financial legal transplantation, and financial regulatory reform. On comparative financial regulation, it contributes a developing world perspective on the legal and institutional challenges of financial regulation and how to deal with these challenges. On financial regulatory transplantation, it contributes to the debate on how best to conceptualise a financial regulatory architecture that mirror contemporary international best practices and that fits into the Nigerian context. In relation to financial regulatory reform, the thesis makes two major sub-contributions. First, it links financial regulation in Nigeria with robust and multi-layered regulatory accountability mechanisms including judicial and democratic accountability. Second, it generates principles that can be transformed into laws and policies to achieve the following: (a) the imposition of mandatory inter-agency co-ordination among financial regulators; (b) imposition of a statutory duty on financial regulators to prevent regulatory failure; (c) the imposition of liability for a supervisory failure induced collapse of a financial institution and (or) a financial crisis; (d) the use of irreversible convertible debentures as a corporate governance disciplinary mechanism to deter imprudent business model and to serve as a forward looking strategy to address the 'historical inevitability of financial crises' in the unlikely event that the financial regulatory system fails.