Female clients are demanding a different approach to financial advice that does not put performance first, three experts on the emerging women’s market said at the Invest In Women conference held by Financial Advisor magazine in Atlanta last week.

Statistics show that financial advisory firms must embrace the female market if they want to thrive, they said. One important statistic to remember, for example, is that that two-thirds of people over 85—and in many cases in charge of their estates—are women, said Padideh Nora Raphael, global head of third-party wealth management business at Goldman Sachs.

And these clients require a different approach, she said.

The financial industry has evolved over the last decade to embrace new strategies that advisors can use to help female clients in particular, as well the male clients who can also benefit, said Raluca Bighiu, senior vice president and family wealth director at Morgan Stanley.

The three strategists made up a panel on Wednesday entitled, “Working with Women on Their Investment Strategies."

Part of the ability to control the money and the returns that will be needed to finance these elderly women’s lives will be derived from direct investing or direct indexing, as it is usually know, according to Monali Vora, global head of quantitative equity solutions at Goldman Sachs.

As it has matured, the financial industry has also evolved in recent years by moving away from Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Wolf of Wall Street” image to a sober and serious industry that is intent on planning rather than being focused on just the performance of a portfolio and how much money can be made, Bighiu said.

“It is becoming tougher and tougher to beat the market,” she added. “But men are still often focused on performance. Men only want to know how their portfolios are doing, but women” want to know if they can reach their goals, and they want empathetic advisors who can assist them.

Bighiu said that within the massive Morgan Stanley organization, her practice is actually quite small. She works with about 15 families to help them achieve their financial and life goals by delivering targeted services.

“We have shifted to life planning over sheer performance,” she said. “We now have more artificial intelligence tools available that allow us to provide more services” profitably. Advisors should not be afraid of artificial intelligence. she said. “AI will not replace advisors, it will replace the mundane tasks” that advisors are now forced to do, which takes time away from client-facing services. “AI cannot connect on a human level.”

Longo also noted that AI allows firms to turn on a dime in their planning processes when situations demand change.

“Many women fall far short of reaching their retirement goals,” which is a shocking situation that still exists, said Raphael. “We have to bridge that gap by using scale and by leveraging resources” to help women be ready for retirement. “We have tools available today to help advisors” show women how they should be thinking about their investment strategies.

One of those strategies involves direct investing, which allows direct investments in equities that are included in a particular index. In this way, the portfolio can be customized to the individual investor, Vora said.

“If an investor only has mutual funds and ETFs, she cannot control her exposure” to individual stocks, Vora said. The next generation of investing” goes beyond the funds to “customize the portfolio.” Ever-evolving technology allows these direct investing techniques to be applied to more portfolios, whether they involve $200 million or $200,000, Vora said. “In this way we have been able to increase the opportunities to design portfolios.”

Direct investing also allows an advisor’s client to use tax loses to offset capital gains, a technique that provides a tax savings, she added.

Advisory firms that concentrate only on the male investor—presumably the husband in many situations—will miss out when the wealth becomes available for transfer, Raphael said. “Advisors need to turn their focus from the husband to the wife and children” of the client. “That is where the money is going to be” in the future.

Bighiu said she focuses part of her energy on where the client’s children are in their lives.

“We are very focused on the next generation. I have children of current clients who feel I am a very familiar to them” because I have established contact over the years, she said.

Whether a firm has connections with the next generation of clients can affect the value of a firm, Longo pointed out.