Financial wellbeing underpins health and happiness, but it is often overlooked in our efforts to improve overall wellbeing. The UK Strategy for Financial Wellbeing published last week by the Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) set out to address that, with an unashamedly ambitious ten-year strategy aiming to make a difference to millions of lives.

What comes next is a short sharp activation phase to lay down clear delivery plans for practical, scalable solutions to meet five key national goals. These goals are:  better financial education for children and young people; helping people build a rainy-day savings buffer; reducing reliance on credit for everyday living; helping people access quality debt advice when they need it;and ensuring everyone knows enough to plan for and during retirement.

This will build on years of work - funded by financial services through the levies - to establish evidence of what works, to test innovations, and to draw upon what we have learned through our debt advice, money and pensions guidance delivery.

We know there are already financial services firms thinking about their role in financial wellbeing. We particularly want to work with you to ensure that we share robust evidence of what works across the sector. We are currently working with a major credit card provider to test what would happen if customers were presented with repayment options in the form of a 'slider?, to show how higher repayments reduce the total amount of interest paid. We are also working with Nest Insights to test Sidecar savings, a product where customers pay directly from their payroll into one savings vehicle that feeds into both liquid savings and a pensions pot. This takes away the tricky choices people have to make if money is tight: should I save for today or for the future?

These are exciting, potentially transformative projects, but there are other things we would like to test: evidence shows that engaging young children with money when they are really young has benefits in the long term. Can you help increase the numbers of parents giving their children pocket money or talking to their kids about money? There is  evidence to suggest the positive effect of ?repay and save? models -  where customers sign up to a loan repayment plan that means repayments tip over into automatic savings once the loan is repaid, building up a savings buffer and improving financial resilience. Could this approach work with a large commercial provider? Proving what works, and scaling it up, could have a massive impact on the financial wellbeing of millions of customers.

What this new strategy presents is opportunity. The opportunity not only to make things better for customers, but also a commercial opportunity. There is a business benefit in having clued-up, confident customers and there are new markets to explore in a business model with financial wellbeing at its heart. I believe this opens the door for innovation and for engaging customers in different ways. If this sparks your interest, please do get in touch to explore how we might work together. Also, find me on Twitter @sarahporretta or @MoneyPensionsUK.