Yet, when it comes to their online initiatives, most firms have done little to match their offline efforts for attracting this desirable market segment. Perhaps, financial services firms' nonchalant approach towards developing websites that cater to older Americans is numerically justified. As an age group, Americans over 50 have generally shown lukewarm interest in using the internet.

According to research for the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 59% of persons between the ages of 50 and 64 do not have internet access and 87% of persons 65 and older do not go online.

Even worse, Pew Research Center found 74% of Americans 50 years and older claim to have no plans to get internet access. Maybe financial service firms are right not to bother spending time and money developing an internet channel for a market segment that clearly demonstrates disinterest in its existence. On the other hand, we are talking about a market segment that controls 80% of all financial assets here. This is not a statistic that any financial services firm can comfortably ignore.

Despite these somber findings by the Pew Research Center, there is hope for financial services firms to attract older Americans online. Within the white space of Pew's study as well as a similar survey by AARP lay some possibilities that, if implemented by financial services firms, could readily change older Americans' minds about using the internet. The first "white space" possibility we should discuss is diminishing the role the PC plays with many firms' websites.

Since it is currently the primary device for accessing the internet, many persons equate online activity with PC usage. However, 57% of Americans over 50 do not use computers, according to Pew's research. And, although demographic variables other than age such as income and education level play a part for why some of these persons do not use computers, economics and education do not explain the whole story. A 65-year-old with a household income of $75,000 is 3 times less likely to own a computer than a 25 year-old with the same income. As for education, Pew found 28% of persons over 50 with college or graduate degrees do not have access to a computer, while less than 6% of persons under 30 with college or graduate degrees do not use PCs.

Outside of access to a computer, older Americans confidence levels with using computers must also be considered. In a survey of 1,002 computer users age 45 and over, AARP found 4 out of 10 users (39%) were not confident in their abilities to conduct financial transactions on their computer.

Of course, as the graph above shows, 57% of AARP's survey participants were at least somewhat confident in using their computers for financial transactions. However, as the table below reveals, the vast majority (60%) of the AARP survey participants were between the ages of 45 and 54. Still, one-third of the participants within this age group expressed a lack of confidence conducting financial transactions by computer. When isolating the participants between the ages of 55 and 64, lack of confidence rose to 51%.