The use of rhetorical appeals within financial technology home pages directly reflects the ideology of the industry, and the expected attitudes for their consumer base. This culture generally likes to see themselves as purely logical, and are less open to the use of pathos, feeling the most security in statistics and numbers. Because of this, the primary rhetorical appeal is logos, followed by ethos, with an extremely rare sprinkle of pathos showing up on occasion.
The heavy bias towards logos and against pathos reflects the nature of the industry and tech culture’s self-perception as a whole. This is not to say that the use of logic is truly impartial here, but rather a form of meeting audience expectations, and validating how they want to feel about themselves. Being swayed by logos and being swayed by pathos are a matter of aesthetic preference, but the mechanics of rhetoric don’t change. Tech savvy consumers like web developers, startup founders, crypto traders, and (neo) investors are swayed by charts and stats (and secondarily brand recognition) in the same way that a dog lover is swayed by cute puppies.
Statistics are the most employed rhetorical appeal ranging from amounts of money earned/saved, to the percentage of historical uptime the site has had. People generally want to see the numbers, especially when it comes to their money, and the financial technology industry runs on numbers. As less established forms of banking (and not being banks, more on that later) customers need to know that if they partner with you, they’ll actually be able to use their money and take their consumers’ money. Dollar amounts, charts (however oversimplified), user counts, and daily API requests are all shown off to build brand credibility.
With a tech savvy audience in mind, the pages show off visually, flexing their web design, as well as the amount of brands they've partnered with.
A startup seeking a payment processing service wants to know that customers will perceive their brand equally as technologically impressive as the payment processor, and flashy web design builds credibility that this will happen. The same is true of the fact that all of these pages have at least one subsection that consists solely of other, more established and well known brand names like Google, BMW, Amazon, and McDonald’s.
Using the established credibility of these partner brands builds trust within users that their brand will be elevated to the status of these industry giants. It also gives a soft confirmation that the company will not fail users with more personal banking needs. If it’s good enough for Forbes, Ford, Uber, LinkedIn and Ebay, it’s good enough for you.
For the reasons mentioned above, true uses of pathos are rare in financial technology home pages, usually focused around safety, data encryption, and protection from fraud,in one instance, paired with the imagery of a mother and child.
Within an industry that values design, traditional rhetorical appeals aren't the only way to build brand confidence. In fact, for many of these pages, the layout design does the heavy lifting.
All brand assets of Stripe, Chime, Square, PayPal, Cash App, and Adyen are cited on this page and within a separate downloadable document. Each asset was acquired either through a Creative Commons license or via press kits, allowing permission for editorial/educational noncommercial use. The entire site was created without template, in Webflow, and exists as a visual representation of the patterns identified and analyzed in the aforementioned companies' desktop home pages.
Home is a genre analysis, not a financial technology company.
1
Stripe | Financial Infrastructure to Grow Your Revenue. Stripe, n.d., https://stripe.com/.
2
Chime - Banking with No Monthly Fees. Fee-Free Overdraft. Build Credit. Chime, n.d., https://www.chime.com/.
3
Power Your Entire Business | Square, Square, n.d., https://squareup.com/us/en.
4
Pay, Send and Save Money with PayPal | PayPal US. PayPal, n.d., https://www.paypal.com/us/home.
5
Cash App - Do More with Your Money. Cash App, n.d., https://cash.app/.
6
Engineered for Ambition - Adyen. Adyen, n.d., https://www.adyen.com/.
7
Geissler, Gary & Zinkhan, George & Watson, Richard. (2001). Web Home Page Complexity and Communication Effectiveness. J. AIS. 2. 0-. 10.17705/1jais.00014.
8
Sutcliffe, A., & Namoun, A. (2012). Predicting user attention in complex web pages. Behaviour & Information Technology, 31(7), 679–695. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2012.692101
9
Doty, P. (1997). Selling the Home Page: An Essay on the World Wide Web and Rhetoric. Internet Reference Services Quarterly, 1(3), 99–105. https://doi.org/10.1300/J136v01n03_12
10
Geissler, G. L., Zinkhan, G. M., & Watson, R. T. (2006). The Influence of Home Page Complexity on Consumer Attention, Attitudes, and Purchase Intent. Journal of Advertising, 35(2), 69–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.2006.10639232
11
Singh, S. N., Dalal, N., & Spears, N. (2005). Understanding Web home page perception. European Journal of Information Systems, 14(3), 288–302. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000525
Thank you for reading!
