The New Brunswick Shared Risk Pension system is an amalgam of the Dutch pension concept and the market consistent  risk based management concepts used by Canadian financial intermediaries. Unlike the Dutch system which was designed to promote defined benefit continuation starting with a relatively healthy pension plans, the defined benefit pension plans converted to under the shared risk pension regime were underfunded and  sometimes significantly underfunded. The principal goal of the shared risk regime is to encourage troubled defined benefit plans to continue sound mortality risk sharing by "getting ahead" of the improvements in the mortality curve while also imposing strong risk measurement criteria (no future reduction in base benefit expected at least 97.5% of the time measured over 20 years in the future and attainment of "target benefit" objectives at least 75% of the time over 20 years in the future). Both member and sponsor contributions are set to obtain these objectives and  can only vary by a small predetermined amount in the future. Contingent benefit increases or decreases  absorb all other future financial volatility.

The New Brunswick government is agnostic as to what level or type of pension benefits are provided in a pension plan. It sees its role as trying to ensure that indicated base and target pension benefits are delivered in the future with a high degree of certainty. To this end, it requires annual calculation of a proxy for risk based capital called the "open group funded ratio" the level of which determines future pension benefits and future pension contributions.