Trustworthy Digital Onboarding Readiness in FinTech Markets:

A Business Analytics Model for e-KYC Conversion

Ilknur Ozturk1,*

1 Faculty of Economics, Administrative and Social Sciences, Nisantasi University, Istanbul, Turkey

Received: January 22, 2025 Revised: March 18, 2025 Accepted: June 26, 2025 ⋆ Corresponding author

ABSTRACT

Digital onboarding has become a decisive business capability for financial technology firms because customer

acquisition, compliance screening, product activation, and trust formation now occur in the same online journey. This

paper proposes a Digital Onboarding Readiness model for evaluating whether a market has the conditions required

to convert identity verification into sustained FinTech usage. The model combines account access, digital payment

use, mobile internet readiness, digital identity support, open-finance policy, regulatory onboarding readiness, and

consumer trust into a business-oriented index. A cross-market indicator panel is analysed using descriptive profiling,

maturity clustering, readiness decomposition, and predictive interpretation. The results show that strong account

ownership alone does not guarantee onboarding maturity. Markets with advanced identity and policy infrastructure

may still face low payment-use conversion, while markets with widespread digital payments may be constrained by

trust and regulatory readiness gaps. The findings suggest that FinTech firms should treat onboarding as a portfolio

capability rather than a front-end compliance step. The paper contributes a transparent measurement framework for

market entry, platform partnerships, and responsible e-KYC investment decisions.

Keywords: Financial technology Digital onboarding e-KYC Digital identity Open finance Business analytics

1. PROBLEM SETTING

For many FinTech firms, the most expensive customer is not

the one who rejects a product immediately, but the one who

starts an application and then abandons the journey because

the verification process is slow, repetitive, uncertain, or poorly

integrated with payment behaviour. Digital onboarding is

therefore not a narrow compliance routine. It is the first

operational test of whether a financial platform can combine

identity, consent, risk screening, payment activation, and

customer trust in a single commercial experience.

The business importance of onboarding has increased as financial

services have moved from branch-based acquisition

to remote account opening, embedded finance, open-finance

consent, digital wallets, and marketplace lending. In these environments,

customer conversion depends on several layers at

once: whether customers have digital accounts, whether they

already use digital payments, whether mobile connectivity

supports remote verification, whether reliable digital identity

rails exist, whether regulations permit remote customer due

diligence, and whether users trust the process enough to complete

it. A market may score well on one of these layers while

still failing to scale FinTech products profitably.

This paper examines digital onboarding as a market-level

readiness problem. The proposed model does not ask whether

a single firm has a good interface or a fast verification vendor.

Instead, it asks whether a market contains the institutional,

behavioural, and infrastructure conditions that make trustworthy

onboarding commercially scalable. This framing is useful

for banks, digital lenders, payment companies, wallets, and