Despite not being labelled as such, this arrangement seems in some way similar to a modern-day life insurance policy. And yet back then, perhaps unsurprisingly, the subscriptions paid by members were not subject to any protections or oversight – indeed, when a burial society did run out of money, it was commonplace simply to issue a notice to convey the demise of the society and the fact that funeral expenses would no longer be met. There is also evidence that soldiers in the Roman army were paid a lump sum at retirement, despite the fact that contributions were not made throughout the soldier’s lifetime. By medieval times, the Church had become one of the largest employers and had started occasionally to issue pensions to clergymen. One such example involved Nicholas Thorne, a former abbot of St Augustine’s monastery, who was living in difficult circumstances. Thorne had voluntarily retired, apparently stricken by a guilty conscience after he acquired some documentation on behalf of the abbey through bribery at the Court of Rome. The scandal led him to retire to an ordinary monastery in Yorkshire, but when his old comrades heard of his infirmity and weakness, they awarded him an ex gratia pension of 10 marks a year 4. It seems unlikely that the Church extended such gestures on a regular basis, but from this point onwards we can see evidence of pension provision via employers (the Church and King), particularly for notable individuals in society where reliance on charity alone would not suffice.
6 CPMI and the Board of IOSCO: Recovery of financial market infrastructures, October 2014 (revised July 2017). 7 FSB: Guidance on central counterparty resolution and resolution planning, 5 July 2017. 8 ECB recommends amending Article 22 of its Statute, 23 June 2017. 9 Article 1 of Council Regulation (EU) No 1024/2013 of 15 October 2013 (the SSM Regulation) explicitly states that  it would “not confer on the ECB any other supervisory tasks, such as tasks relating to the prudential supervision of central counterparties”. 10 See also Cœuré, B. (2018), “A cooperative approach to CCP recovery and resolution”, panel intervention by at  the ILF Conference on “Resolution in Europe: the unresolved questions”, Frankfurt am Main, 23 April. 11 On 5 July 2017, CPMI-IOSCO announced follow-up work in the area of good practices for CCPs’ default  management auctions (Cover Note to the CPMI-IOSCO revised report on Recovery of financial market infrastructures). 5/5  BIS central bankers' speeches