Who's been hit hardest by the on-going recession? You could make an easy case for small businesses. No one is lining up to bail them out for bad decisions. Banks certainly haven't boosted liquidity for the segment in any meaningful way. 

And yet it's becoming clear that small businesses present banks large and small, national and local with a massive opportunity--one they'll be sorry if they miss. Forrester Research notes in a recent report, "The State of U.S. Small Business Banking," that small banks, once they get a taste of online banking, tend to become avid online users. Forrester notes that small business customers are older, wealthier and more comfortable online. In many ways, small businesses represent the future of online retail banking. 

You can imagine the time savings and convenience that online banking offers the typical, harried small business owner. It's no wonder that these people tend to gravitate toward the web. About 65 percent use the web when monitoring accounts or making transactions. Increasingly, these sorts of features are essential to the daily management of their affairs. 

In short, this represents a big opportunity to really lock in the customer and then upsell them. But Forrester says that one in three small business owners believe that national banks do not want their business. And more than 20 percent of small business customers do not have a banking relationship, which is a sad state of affairs and a missed opportunity for banks. 

Ideally, a bank would work hard to identify which of their retail customers is a small business owner and create specific services geared toward them, different cash management accounts, remote deposit options and the like, and then launch an appropriate marketing campaign. They're likely to find a willing audience and a chance to finally begin to fulfill the promise of online banking. - Jim