In its third quarter performance results, the service said it received more than 300,000 customer contacts each week in the months between April and December 2013.
It said it had provided more budgeting guidance to people than ever before, with 5,600 completions of its Budget Planner tool every week during Q3, up from 4,500 in Q2.
Its partners provided more than 3,000 free debt advice sessions a week to people in England and Wales, adding to the 125,000 sessions that were provided in the year to date.
The MAS embarked on a ‘primarily digital’ strategy from 2012/13 but the contacts were spread across the online platform, over the phone, through web chat and face-to-face advice sessions.
More people were accessing the service through partners such as banks, local authorities and other websites, it said.
The MAS was set up by government in 2011 to provide impartial money guidance and work with partners to help consumers with their debt problems for free.
It was last autumn branded “not fit for purpose” by the Treasury committee (TC), which found it was failing in its objectives and not offering value for money.
The MPs called for an urgent independent review into the service after criticising its role and reach, and questioning the salaries it pays its top executives.
They accused the service of unnecessarily duplicating other services in the market, spending too much money on marketing and following a “misguided” approach.
But a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) out in December found the MAS was going in the right direction and would “soon be providing value for money”.
The NAO found the MAS had had a rocky start in 2011 but had managed to better target consumers thereafter. It was also already providing value for money on its debt advice, the NAO said.
In a TC grilling on Tuesday morning John Griffith-Jones, the chairman of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which has oversight of the MAS, countered MPs’ concerns about the service, saying he was “confident it is now on the right track”.
He said: “[The MAS] has an incredibly important job to do and they had a strategy to build this automated computerised advice service. I don’t think it’s perfect but they have had 10 million hits.
“I can’t tell whether someone coming out of the website gets what they want or changes their behaviour as a result of it but I have to believe that from a cost benefit perspective that a computerised system that is widely accessible and has a good reputation is actually a major step forward.
