From Account Access to Payment Value: A Business Readiness

Model for FinTech Innovation

Samandarboy Sulaymanov1,* Durdona Davletova1

1Tashkent State University of Economics, Uzbekistan

Emails: s.sulaymanov@tsue.uz; d.davletova@tsue.uz

Received: January 02, 2024 Revised: March 05, 2024 Accepted: June 05, 2024 ⋆ Corresponding author

ABSTRACT

Digital finance markets often expand through account ownership before those accounts become active sources of

payment value, merchant participation and durable financial behaviour. This paper develops a business-oriented

FinTech readiness model that separates access, activation, merchant conversion, stored-value behaviour and resilience.

The analysis uses regional and income-group indicators from the Global Findex database to examine how account

access is transformed into commercially meaningful digital payment use. The results show that account ownership

alone is an incomplete measure of FinTech market opportunity. High-income economies have the strongest overall

readiness, East Asia and Pacific shows strong merchant-payment conversion, Sub-Saharan Africa has a distinctive

mobile-money channel, and low-income economies show large unmet activation potential. The paper contributes a

practical scorecard for banks, payment firms and regulators by showing where digital finance strategy should focus:

onboarding, usage activation, merchant acceptance, account-based value retention, or trust and resilience safeguards.

Keywords: Financial technology Digital payments Business model innovation Financial inclusion Global Findex

1. INTRODUCTION

Financial technology is often described through products -

wallets, instant payments, buy-now-pay-later services, digital

banks, application programming interfaces and embedded

finance. A business-oriented analysis needs a different starting

point. The relevant question is whether a population has

moved from financial access to repeated, valuable and trusted

digital use. A payment app can be technologically advanced

and still produce limited business value if customers keep

accounts dormant, merchants do not accept digital payments,

or users cannot connect payments to savings, resilience and

everyday commerce.

This paper studies that transition. It treats digital payment

readiness as a conversion chain rather than a single adoption

variable. The first stage is account access. The second

is payment activation, measured by whether adults made or

received a digital payment. The third is merchant conversion,

which indicates whether digital payments enter ordinary

commerce. The fourth is value retention, reflected in the use

of accounts to store or save money. The fifth is resilience,

which indicates whether users can manage shocks and therefore

trust the digital financial channel as part of household or

small-business life.

The business implications of digital payment growth remain

uneven across markets. In some regions, digital payment

activity creates strong merchant opportunities and supports

platform-based financial services. In others, account ownership

has expanded without translating into frequent digital

usage. The central question is therefore strategic: which

market conditions indicate that account access is likely to become

payment value, and which conditions reveal a dormantaccount

opportunity?

The empirical source is the Global Findex database and its