Dave Wallace was 25 years into a successful career in and around digital banking. He’d been one of the first UX designers working in the United Kingdom’s financial services space. But in talking to customers in recent years, he started to notice that the intense focus on usability and online experience had left customers wanting for real connections with their banks. Wallace noticed that the people he surveyed were anxious about their money.“Well, the digital channels are not solving those problems at all,” he remembers them saying.“In fact, what we feel is that we’ve been pushed down this terminal by the banks. And although we’re closer to money, we’re not closer to the institutions, which provide these channels.”So, Wallace, Natalie Raja, and Mark Caudell started NMD+, a creative and tech consultancy firm that works to improve customer experience for financial services.“Everything the industry has done for years has been about optimizing processes and perfecting processes,” Wallace says.“And what we hadn’t done was spent really any time thinking about relationships and engagement.”We connected with Wallace to learn more about the different challenges of connecting with consumers that face an incumbent and challenger bank. We wanted to know the value of tone and how his background in psychology has helped him understand the way banks communicate with customers.Unifimoney: Let’s say you were advising an incumbent bank and a challenger bank; what are the biggest differentiators in brand strategy between the two?Dave Wallace: For a challenger bank, it would be about, ‘How do you really understand what you’re doing from a kind of product and proposition point of view and, more outward-looking, how do you connect better with an audience in order to do that?’ The goal is to really dial up the experience around that and build a loyal customer base. Then,…