To serve their individual clients better wealth management firms should be challenging conventional wisdom about what these clients want, Sallie Krawcheck, president of Bank of America Global Wealth and Investment Management, said at a recent conference, according to On Wall Street.

Speaking at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority's annual conference, Krawcheck said BofA’s Merrill Lynch has spent time since the financial crisis finding out what individual investors actually want, and has found them to be more risk averse now than before. She added that the mention of structured products and collateralized debt obligations still held negative connotations for investors.

Notably, investors want to get back into the stock market, but are still reeling from past losses. However, they have new needs resulting from their experiences, and wealth management firms can attract these investors back by meeting these, Krawcheck reportedly said. These include focusing on wealth preservation, and managing downside risk to provide security for clients.

According to the report, Krawcheck also advocated eradicating preconceptions about age demographics, saying that older generations are very much in touch with new technologies, and younger generations – generally thought of as more risk tolerant – are actually risk averse.

“Despite conventional wisdom, 25- to 35-year-olds are more conservative than everyone but their grandparents,” Krawcheck is quoted saying. “They’re not really day trading. They’re more in the banks than they are day trading.”

Panel members at the conference also expressed concerns about the possibility of a uniform fiduciary standard for broker-dealers and investment advisors, according to OWS.

“You can certainly be a fiduciary for one client,” Krawcheck is quoted as saying. “You can’t be a fiduciary for 700 or 7,000.”