For Edinburgh boy David White, leaving school with Highers meant a job in financial services. "When I was offered the job, my grandfather came out of the house and shook my hand because he was so pleased that I had got what was deemed to be a good job."

He pauses. "I am not sure if that is where the industry is now."

In the 1970s, Scottish Life liked to post new entrants to its London office. "On my 18th birthday I went to London on a two-year stint. I never came back."

Now White is at the heart of the government's mission to help the 18-year-olds of the future become more empowered financial consumers.

As chief executive for the past eight years of the Children's Mutual, the Kent-based friendly society which invented "baby bonds", White has been intimately involved in the government's creation of child trust funds (CTFs) and the plans for their long-term role in financial education.

As a member of the Financial Services Authority's working group on financial capability, he has helped devise a "parents' guide to money", which is to be distributed in future by midwives. Also a trustee of the Personal Finance Education Group charity, White says progress is being made in a key area of policy.

"Hats off to the government, they have gone for this idea that when the age seven' child trust fund payment comes along, there will be money work in all schools, they are bringing in personal finance inter-functional maths, and there is the Thoresen review on generic advice."

The FSA has this month declared it wants to widen the availability of advice by deregulating it for basic financial needs and products, and Aegon UK chief Otto Thoresen's review is to recommend how this might be done.

The long-term plan is that the unlocking of CTFs at age 18 will provide a "financial springboard" for young people - and their parents - to become more engaged in their personal finances.

White says: "We have got to re-teach ourselves to speak the customer's language, because the word advice means something highly regulated. We have become unhelpful. Someone calls up a call centre for advice to be told they can't be given any. A lot of the time all they are wanting is information."

Informing parents about children's saving can help build the business of White's organisation. The former Tunbridge Wells Equitable Friendly Society now has 20% of all actively-opened child trust funds, and since 2004 has grown its customer base from 330,000 to 630,000. White says of its CTF subsidiary: "You can capitalise the subsidiary to put a value on it we are very happy with what we believe the value to be."

White enjoyed a rapid rise in his early career to become pensions director at Prudential in 1993. "If you are very good in sales one of the things they do is promote you out of earning too much money, so they send you off to marketing - it's a management trick."

But by 1996, with the Pru facing one of its regular upheavals, White's job had been restructured and he found himself in Kent as sales and marketing director of the tiny mutual organisation. "The attractions were senior management at the top level and I needed a job."

Three years later a new chairman, Lord Naseby, the former MP Michael Morris whose back- ground was in marketing, took over in Kent and installed White as chief executive, with the brief of reinvigorating the business.

"It was just in a vacuum. If you tried to go upstairs at a minute past five you would get knocked over by the people coming out. I shook the admin side up, but what changed the most was getting everyone together and telling people where we were going, You can't kick the goals if you don't know where the posts are and suddenly people had posts."

The name "baby bonds" had been trademarked by the Tunbridge Wells 10 years earlier, and the savings plans (tax-exempt up to £25 a month, under friendly society statute) for children were already two-thirds of its business.

"My hunch was that baby bonds would be made for direct marketing," White says. "We had a small direct sales force and I closed it, because they had to go through a full advice process with a narrow bag of products and half the time were telling people not to buy them."

Amid such cost pressures, a new business plan was devised. "It was clear to us for economic reasons we would have to scale up There is nothing wrong with coming up with a really great strategy because you want to survive."

But the society would have to compete for CTFs with fund managers and high street banks, and "play in the low-price world that this whole industry is having to play in".

In 2003 came the name change to Children's Mutual, which won the day over names such as Beanstalk and Acorn. White is delighted that recent research found the name one of four mentioned by consumers, when asked about kids' savings, alongside Halifax, Nationwide and Abbey.

The society benefits equally among the 14 CTF providers from the allocation of accounts for people who have not activated their government vouchers within a year. Interestingly, White says a lack of interest is not down to social background. "The truth is that about 40% of people allocated to us are postcoded as affluent'. It is not about whether you are well or not well off, but whether you engage in the process or whether you don't. The propensity to add monthly savings is much higher among those who choose us than those who are allocated to us."

The society's forward strategy is to build relationships with its CTF customers, for its other savings plans and possibly new family-linked products such as specialist insurance.

White has begun "affinity marketing" exercises such as holding the society's annual meeting at London Zoo and offering customers a free day out.

Among his innovations in Kent are "feedback loops" in the call centre, to help understand what sort of advice customers need, and feed those back into the FSA.

But the move to more generic advice will not in itself change anything, White warns. "It will be vitally important to get the service right. People won't wake up on a Saturday morning and start wanting to sort out their children's savings and pensions just because there is a new service around."

Married with three teenage children, White is an occasional visitor home. "I miss going to see Hearts and tomorrow I will be upset to leave, as I always am."

But he believes his business mission is unlikely to be derailed by political change. "Even if the CTF was stopped, it will have created a culture to save for children - our belief is that society is coming to our party."