Many people find financial products complex and daunting and, faced with something they don’t fully understand, put off making decisions, in many cases indefinitely. This means that people don’t get the advice they need and tend not to save enough or make sufficient provision to deal with the financial risks they face.

Rising life expectancy and more frequent job changes make it much more difficult – but also more important - to plan effectively.  So getting people to think about their financial needs, and act on them, is a pressing need.

We’ve supported measures to improve financial capability among consumers for a long time now. For example, we’ve given financial backing to the Personal Finance Education Group (pfeg) which promotes financial education in schools. We’re also supporting the FSA’s Make The Most of Your Money project, which delivers free financial education to employees through a workplace seminar delivered by a specially trained presenter.

We’re also currently funding, along with Barclays, a pilot scheme with Citizens Advice. Members of the Personal Finance Society, the professional body for financial advisers, acting on a pro bono basis are ‘embedded’ in Citizens Advice bureaux and make themselves available to provide financial guidance to those bureaux’s clients.

We believe this sort of ‘generic advice’, which is about helping people to help themselves and not about selling specific products, is an important way to get people to engage with their financial needs. So we were especially pleased when our Chief Executive, Otto Thoresen, was asked by the Government to head an independent review, looking at how a national generic advice service might work.