A lot of conventional wisdom about wirehouse advisors, female clients and millennials is wrong and misguides the financial advice industry, Sallie Krawcheck told attendees at the Inside ETFs conference.

Krawcheck, the former president of global wealth and investment management for Bank of America, said in a keynote address today on the future of financial advice that to read "the newspaper and HighTower press releases," one would think that financial advisors are streaming out of wirehouses to independent broker-dealers and registered investment advisories, resulting in a lot of client money being in flux. When Krawcheck oversaw Merrill Lynch at Bank of America, she recalled, she was speaking to two research analysts who thought Merrill lost 2,000 advisors of its 17,000 in one year. "The real number was 36," she said.

"After we read about all the advisors leaving, then we read about how unhappy clients are with the advisors," Krawcheck said. But high-net-worth client satisfaction at wirehouses is as high as it was when she was at Merrill -- 86 percent, she said.

Core high-net-worth clients leave their wirehouse advisors at only a low single-digit percent rate, Krawcheck said. Clients are even harder to pry away if they are also getting banking services, such as mortgages, bank accounts, small business loans or automatic bill pay, she added.

"But what is absolutely true is that clients report that they are unhappy with the Wall Street firms themselves," she said. "But the big Wall Street firms today remain financial powerhouses. And while clients may not like 'too big to fail' as public policy, it's a helluva marketing campaign. ... [Clients] are disappointed in the firms, but they abide by them."

Another view supported by the media is that wirehouse advisors primarily are stock pickers and aren't very good at it, she said. The truth is that advisors can't "outperform" as a group because "they are the market." In fact, clients don't particularly know whether their advisor outperforms the market, says Krawcheck, who adds that in all the client focus groups that she's participated in, not a single client was ever able to tell her what the actual performance of their portfolio was.

Clients overall report that they are OK with performance that they think is "good enough," she said. In Merrill's research, poor investment came in No. 8 as a reason that clients left their advisors, she said. Number one was the "phone call isn't returned quickly enough."

Research she conducted shows that client satisfaction increases in direct proportion to the number of contacts the client has with his or her advisor, Krawcheck said.

Clients want to reach their goals, whether the market is up or down, she said, and advisors need to do a better job in helping clients achieve them. Other ways in which clients say an advisor delivers value, she said, is forcing them to do financial plans, not letting them panic and sell at the wrong time, and asking them awkward questions like "What are you going to do if you lose your job?", "What happens when you die?", and "How are you going to take care of your parents?"

Also, clients appreciate help in understanding the risks to their portfolio and with capital preservation, she said, noting that not many advisors spend time on capital preservation.

Krawcheck also identified misperceptions when it comes to women, who are on the way to holding the majority of wealth in the nation. They are going to inherit 70 percent of $1 trillion of intergenerational wealth transfers, 90 percent will control their own wealth on their own at some point, more graduate from college than men, they are starting businesses at twice the rate of the population, they are breadwinners or co-breadwinners in 60 percent of households, and they live six to eight years longer than most of the population and are healthier while doing it.

In spite of those statistics, one major industry publication recently did a series of articles on women that referred to them as a "niche" market, said Krawcheck, who is now chief executive of 85 Broads, a professional women's networking organization committed to the economic empowerment of women globally.

"It's no wonder then, that this group, women, ranks the financial services industry 33 out of 33 of the businesses that serve them," Krawcheck said. "They report that they pick up on an attitude for the industry overall that leads it to be called a niche market. They feel sort of marginalized, they feel spoken down to."

She noted this attitude came through in a recent advertisement that talks to women about investing in the stock market -- instead of in shoes. She also cited a recent news article in which an advisor said that he adjusted his practice to serve women by sometimes going cellphone shopping with them.

She said advisors, the majority of whom are men, think they serve clients as a family. But research refutes that. Male and female advisors were filmed as they spoke to a couple, and afterwards the advisors thought they spent about 50 percent of their time speaking to the husband and 50 percent to the wife. When advisors were shown the tape, they saw that they actually spent the vast majority of their time speaking to the husband, she said.

"I'm going to share with you a fact. Seventy percent of widows leave their advisor within one year of their husband's death," she said. "Now we're starting to talk about a real opportunity."

What's needed? It would help if the industry increased its number of female advisors, now at about 17 percent, she said.

"When we talk to women and ask what they are looking for, they say they want more downside protection, they want longevity protection. Money is an enabler for women. The majority of women, even those making more than $250,000 a year, have the bag lady syndrome. They are scared of becoming bag ladies."

Women want to be spoken to in plain English, and just over half are interested in values-based investing, which has become a multi-trillion asset market that will continue to grow as women control more of the wealth, she said.

She added that women move more slowly on relationships than men do. Women report just as they start to commit, the advisor has given up on getting the business, she said. But when women do commit, they are more loyal and generate more referrals than men do, she added.

Another opportunity is the next generation, currently the millennials, born from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. Only 2 percent of the next generation stay with their parents' advisor, Krawcheck said, "and it's because the truth is, we often don't know the next generation."

"Millennials want information and they want it not just during office hours. They want it the way they want it. They want it delivered online and personally. ... They have grown up with the idea that Wall Street is rigged. For any advisor to say, 'I'm not on Wall Street,' they don't get that," Krawcheck said.

As a result, millennials are as conservative as the oldest investors are today, she said. Like women, they also are very interested in values-based investing. "Do we really think they are going to be driving their electric cars and wearing their Tom shoes, sporting their Warby Parker glasses, taking their recyclable bags to the grocery store, working only for companies whose values align with theirs, and investing in companies that are, for example, hurting the environment if they are given another realistic option?"

Krawcheck also noted the importance of social media. "I don't think we fully recognize that this changes everything. "People who are not on LinkedIn are viewed as older and less technologically savvy. ... Why would you make it hard to find yourself in the business that we're in?"

More than 90 percent of the mass affluent -- $100,000 to $1 million in investable assets -- used social media in the last few months, Krawcheck said, and 44 percent, on its way to 50 percent, used it to engage a financial services provider.

Financial advisors can use social media as an enormous positive. For one, advisors can use it to show themselves as an expert on certain topics, she said. Most financial services companies aren't using social media right, however, she added.

Overall, Krawcheck was very upbeat about the financial advice business. "I've never been anything but a fan of the advisory business and what you've all done. ... If you look around you'll see some opportunities in places that others aren't looking."