As the fastest growing channel in the financial industry, independent advisors are competing for an expanding pool of potential clients.

Yet should focusing more attention on women as a "niche" client group be a part of their growth strategies?

There was some disagreement over this issue among speakers at the 2016 TD Ameritrade National LINC conference in Orlando, Fla., on Thursday, with Ric Edelman of Edelman Financial Services contending that calling serving women clients a "niche" service is wrong.

One panel of speakers at the conference said a singular focus on women clients makes sense given the way women are exerting more influence in the business world and in their family's finances.

“We view the incredible trends in the industry as a tremendous opportunity,” said Eileen O’Connor, managing principal of Tysons, Va.-based Hemington Wealth Management. “Women are the primary breadwinners in four out of 10 families, and in 95 percent of those families, women will be the primary financial decision-maker. It’s the single most important trend that’s going to impact our careers.”

O’Connor unveiled data from a 2015 Hemington study on breadwinner women during the discussion that showed women were not making connections with their advisors.

“There are issues of underconfidence that women deal with when working with their finances,” O’Connor said. “Sixty-two percent of women who work with an advisor had no clue about their own finances. As advisors, we view that as our job and our role, and we’re not delivering on that to women.”

O’Connor, who did not originally intend to market to women, recommended that RIAs tailor at least part of their practice to serving women breadwinners.

“For the first five to six years after I started as an advisor, I resisted the idea of focusing on women as a niche market,” O’Connor said. That view changed after her firm did a study on affluent women in 2011. "I really looked at it as an opportunity and convinced myself to focus on the results, and women are first focus now to Hemington," she said. "We’ve seen tremendous growth as a result. We were the eleventh-fastest-growing RIA in the nation in 2015.”

Not all advisors felt that women are a niche market.

Speaking during a panel later in the day, Edelman, CEO of Fairfax, Va.-based Edelman Financial Services, maintained that it is the wrong for advisors to think of serving women as an advisor specialty.  

“An awful lot of the conversation about women in the marketplace is nonsense,” Edelman said. “It’s mostly being pushed by the financial trade press to create a market niche that doesn’t exist. You can’t have a niche of 50 percent of the world’s population.”

Edelman says the financial industry already serves most affluent women indirectly. “The vast majority, 80-85 percent, of our clients are married and there’s already a woman involved,” Edelman said. “If anyone thinks it’s just the husband making the decision, they haven’t been married very long. We are already serving women, and to say that I’m just going to serve the wife’s issue or the women’s issue isn’t what the women want any more than just serving the husband’s issue or the men’s issue is what the men want.”

Edelman said that the financial industry is better off positioning itself to serve couples of all sorts. “We cater to LGBT couples, too. For the vast majority of American households, the clients aren’t individuals,” Edelman says. “It’s going to continue to be a couple’s world, a couple’s environment and a couple’s social environment.”

Darlene Murphy, president of Wellesley, Mass.-based Wellesly Investment Advisors, agreed, in part. “Fifty percent of the population is not a niche to go after in ways that we at times have been advised to, but I have personally seen a subtle shift in our clientele,” Murphy said. “More of our clients are coming to us as equals, husband and wife. That’s a subtle shift that we’ve seen, but it hasn’t created a market niche.”

Speaking on the earlier panel, Elisabeth Cullington, managing director and co-founder of the women’s practice at San Diego-based HoyleCohen Wealth Management, said that RIAs must pivot and address women as a niche in order to serve them appropriately.

“Women tend to be more judgmental on the type of service they’re receiving and how they’re served in the office,” Cullington said. “Putting a team of advisors around women to give them the support they need changed my view on how I deliver my plans and how I deliver my conversations to my clients.”

Cullington said that HoyleCohen not only changed parts of its planning process, but also the process for how women are treated within their office. This included changes in the office's appearance, how a client’s name is displayed, how and where the client handshake takes place, down to knowing what the client likes to drink.

At Itasca, Ill.-based RIA Balasa Dinverno Foltz, Jen Dawson, a wealth manager, said the firm uses a coordinated approach to prospect for and retain woman clients.

“It’s all about the three ‘ins’—invitations, introductions and information,” Dawson said. “We always invite our clients to events that are an authentic reason for us to reach out, with our high tea event being our annual focus. We introduce them to other professionals. If you can connect a woman with other professionals, you’re even more valuable to them as an advisor. We also provide them with information in the form of blogs, whitepapers and articles. We’re also teaching our team how to listen point-by-point how to be an empathetic listener and how to build confidence.”