The drive for a global regulatory framework in financial services took a giant leap forward last week at an OECD conference on private pension funds in Sofia, Bulgaria.

More than 100 regulators from OECD countries met their counterparts from Latin America, as well as central and eastern Europe, to thrash out 15 new principles of private occupational pension schemes.

A Reuters report said the principles range from setting up an adequate regulatory framework of pension funds and their interaction with financial markets to the rights of beneficiaries, calculation techniques and supervisory structures.