Financial access configurations, online purchasing and payment settlement in Sub-Saharan Africa

Digital commerce in Sub-Saharan Africa requires both market connectivity and usable payment capability. This study examines how financial-access configurations, recent internet use and smartphone status are associated with online purchasing and payment settlement using Global Findex 2025 microdata collected in 2024. The principal adoption sample contains 22,239 respondents across 33 economies, while the account-configuration analysis includes 19,878 respondents classified with at least one constructed account type. Survey-weighted probit, multinomial-logit and linear-probability models incorporate economy fixed effects and economy-clustered inference. Mobile-money classification, financial-institution access and recent internet use are associated with 6.58-, 7.88- and 6.81-percentage-point higher online-purchase probabilities, respectively. Adjusted purchase probabilities are 9.42% for financial-institution access only, 9.74% for mobile money only and 19.51% for both account types. The adjusted dual-versus-single difference is 10.21 percentage points (wild-cluster-bootstrap 95% confidence set: 8.28-12.15) and remains between 9.62 and 11.44 points across weighting specifications and between 9.77 and 10.41 points in leave-one-economy-out analyses. The two single-account probabilities do not differ statistically (difference = 0.33 percentage points; p = .759). Purchase-pathway models further show that the digital-settlement association exceeds the cash-on-delivery-only association for mobile-money classification and financial-institution access (cross-equation Wald tests, p < .001 and p = .001, respectively), though not detectably for recent internet use (p = .110). The findings identify a stable account-configuration pattern within the routed analytical populations and are interpreted as adjusted associations. Keywords: Digital Financial Inclusion, Mobile Money, Online Purchasing, Payment Settlement, Global Findex, Sub-Saharan Africa.