The times they are a’changin’ — and quickly, at that.

Though the fall conference of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors in Indianapolis was themed as “Racing to Success,” the presentations focused more on how the world is racing by the traditional financial service industry and threatens to leave NAPFA’s fee-only membership behind if they failed to embrace the change.

The major engines of change discussed this year were demographic, technological and economic.

As millennials, or Generation Y, come into their own, advisors will have to adjust their business practices to meet changing demands, said R. Alan Moore, co-founder of the XY Planning Network.

“Gen Y is the largest generation in history,” Moore said. “Gen X and Y are not a niche, they are half the population. I can’t tell you what Gen Y thinks because Gen Y is 93 million people.”

Moore emphasized that younger investors from Generation X and Y want debt and cash-flow management advice and prefer to work with advisors within 10 years of their own age, meaning that firms interested in attracting them will need to bring on younger advisors.

“The source of value creation years back when I started in this business was more about investment performance,” said Hazel Durand, senior vice president, Growing Advisor, at Fidelity Investments. “The value that is being brought to this business through planning has turned that whole process on its head. We’re seeing much more focus on life planning, goal setting and budgeting, really helping people achieve their life-long goals and along the way investing appropriately to support them.”

Financial Advisor contributor and founder of RTD Financial Advisors Roy Diliberto, a pioneer of holistic, behaviorally driven financial planning processes, agreed. He divided planning into exterior services, focused on quantitative assets, and interior services, focused on qualitative elements like clients’ personalities, behavior and needs.

“We’ve all been trained well in technical skills,” Diliberto said. “Think about what it is that we do that can become a commodity. We do tax planning, estate planning, investment advice and insurance – and all of these things are easily commoditized, that’s going to put us in danger if that is all we do -- however, wisdom can never be commoditized, and that’s what we offer our clients. That’s the interior of what we do.”

Generation Y is also forcing a major shift in technology, said Trent Witthoeft, vice president of technology consulting at Fidelity Investments.

“Technology is going to force us to be more efficient,” Witthoeft said. “I think it’s going to change the way clients will demand their advisors interact with them. The robos are doing a good job of taking some newer technology and putting it at the forefront of their value proposition. What that means for us is that clients are going to like some of these things and are going to demand it of us.”

But embracing technology also exposes RIAs to new risks, like hackers, said Tom Moore, chief information officer at Cincinnati-based Formidable Asset Management.

“In July 2015, there were 74 cyberattacks tracked in 20-plus categories, with individual targets ranked seventh, and financial targets ranked eighth,” Moore said. “Everybody in this room is a member of the seventh and the eighth most-common threat categories that are actively being targeted by hackers every day.”

Amidst the demographic and technological revolutions pressuring financial services, market uncertainty is driving interest in alternative investment products, said Brody Browe, executive director of Philadelphia-based Franklin Square Capital Partners.

“The middle-market economy is decoupling from the rest of the global perspective, which is another rationale that exposure in middle markets, in particular credit, might make sense in a portfolio today,” Browe said. “We have falling commodity prices, retail mutual fund outflow, market illiquidity, problems in the bond market, problems in the mutual fund market, we have potential for higher rates, we have a challenged global banking system, geopolitical system is always a concern, and we have China — is it going to be a hard landing?”

Martin Regalia, chief economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, through even more water on the global economy.

“The economy has grown for the last six years, but it hasn’t grown the way it’s supposed to grow,” Regalia says. “Economies are supposed to reach their potential, they are supposed to employ resources in the most efficient way and as a result create an improving standard of living. Unfortunately what we’re seeing is an economy that hasn’t done that for six years.”

So what’s a fee-only RIA to do? Embrace the change, said keynote speaker Kathy Cleveland Bull of Columbus, Ohio-based N-Compass Consulting.

“We have a choice in how we respond to change,” Bull said. “Everyone has a default setting, it’s the filter through which you view events and circumstances. It’s your choice. The more you use a setting, the more you strengthen tendencies. It’s an attitude muscle, you’re strengthening it day-by-day. We create our own misery or happiness just by what we incrementally strengthen day-in or day-out. “