Volume 6 • Issue 2 • PP: 01–08 • 2026
From Connectivity to Use: An Innovation-Conversion Model of Digital Finance Across Developing Economies
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© 2026 The Author(s). Published by ASPG. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
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Digital connectivity has grown more rapidly than people’s engagement with formal digital finance, creating a policy gap beyond mere device, account and network coverage. This article proposes an innovation-conversion framework to approximate the effectiveness of the enabling conditions to be translated into digital-payment usage. Six crosssections are set up as non-competing predictive specifications, repeated cross-validation, out-of-fold benchmarking, regional stress tests and unsupervised archetype mapping to analyse a harmonized 2024 cross-section of 74 low and middle-income economies. The top performing Elastic Net specification achieved a mean cross-validated R2 of 0.867, an out-of-fold R2 of 0.881, and a mean absolute error of 5.23 percentage points. The signal from account ownership was the predominant one, with additional information coming from mobile internet access, self-reported exposure to internet fraud, and internet-skill constraints. The proposed conversion-gap index defines the economies where the actual use of payments significantly under- or over-performs what is expected given the enabling environment. The positive converters were Mongolia, the Republic of Congo, Lesotho and Venezuela, while the largest negative gaps were in India, Ethiopia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the West Bank and Gaza. Mature digital-use systems, use lagging access-rich systems, mobile-led transitions and foundational access gaps are four structural archetypes that further distinguish the mature systems. The findings change the perception of financial innovation as a conversion issue: infrastructure is important, but institutional onboarding, accessible accounts, building of trust, security, and capabilities will be the keys to making connectivity a commonplace financial transaction.
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