The Money Advice Service is to concentrate on the workplace to encourage people to save more.

In its business plan for 2018/19, expected to be its last before it is replaced by a single financial guidance body, MAS said it would focus on “understanding effective ways of encouraging people to save via the workplace.”

The body also said it would be looking at how fintech can improve money management behaviours.

The report listed some of the MAS’s other priorities as “increasing the provision of high-quality, free-to-client debt advice” and “developing plans to commission and fund interventions to build the financial capability of working adults and of children and young people.”

MAS is set to be axed in its current form and merged with TPAS and Pension Wise to form a single financial guidance body before the end of 2018.

Charles Counsell, MAS chief executive, said: “Of course everything we do in 2018/19 will be set against the backdrop of the creation of the single financial guidance body (SFGB).

“In MAS we are excited about the prospect of the SFGB coming into existence.

“For us this underlines the direction of our travel, focused on: a strategic approach to financial capability and debt advice; the need to increase the supply of quality debt advice as set out in the Wyman review; evidence-based decision-making; segmentation; the prioritisation of our customer base; and partnership working.

“We anticipate that during the course of the year that this plan covers, MAS employees will transfer into the new organisation alongside colleagues from TPAS and Pension Wise.

“I do not underestimate the challenge we have set ourselves in delivering a full year’s business plan against the backdrop of that simple fact, but that is what we intend to do.”

MAS has faced criticism for overspending and other issues in the past, not least from Parliament’s Treasury Committee, which has expressed “serious concerns about the ability of the MAS to perform its functions” and questioned “whether the MAS should exist at all as a statutory body.”

MAS chairman Andy Briscoe said the restructuring process was going well.

He said: “I believe that 2018/19 will be the most successful year the Money Advice Service has ever had.

“And a marker of that success is the fact that it will almost certainly be the last year of the Money Advice Service’s existence.”