Korea Exchange Brand Guidelines: A 2005 Merger in Busan, KOSPI and KOSDAQ

A 1956 stock market and a 2005 merger.

Korea Exchange, known as KRX, is the operator of South Korea’s securities and derivatives markets. English Wikipedia calls it the country’s sole securities exchange operator, headquartered in Busan, with an office in Seoul for the cash markets and market oversight. In its present form it is young: Korean Wikipedia dates it to 27 January 2005, when four bodies were combined into one joint-stock company — the Korea Stock Exchange, the Korea Futures Exchange, the KOSDAQ stock market company and the KOSDAQ committee.

The stock market it runs is older. Korean Wikipedia records that the Daehan Stock Exchange was founded on 11 February 1956 and that the Korean securities market opened on 3 March 1956. The exchange became a joint-stock company in 1962 and a public body named the Korea Stock Exchange in 1963; on 2 July 1979 it moved from Myeong-dong, in central Seoul, to Yeouido, also in Seoul. In 1988 it became member-owned, and computerised trading began on 3 March that year.

Korean Wikipedia’s timeline also reaches further back, to markets that came before the 1956 exchange: a rice exchange at the treaty port of Incheon opened in 1896, a Seoul rice exchange followed in 1920, and in 1932, under Japanese colonial rule, the two were combined into the Chosen Exchange. The same timeline records that the rice market was abolished in 1939, when wartime rationing was introduced. The 1956 exchange is where the present company’s own line begins.

The merger itself grew out of policy. Korean Wikipedia says a plan to modernise the securities and futures markets was announced in August 2003, the Korea Stock & Futures Exchange Act was passed in January 2004, and the combined company opened in January 2005 as the Korea Stock & Futures Exchange. Its head office went to Busan. On 4 February 2009, under the new Capital Markets Act, the name was shortened to Korea Exchange.

KOSPI, KOSDAQ and the derivatives market.

Korea Exchange is organised around its markets. English Wikipedia describes three business divisions inherited from the former exchanges: the Stock Market Division, the KOSDAQ Market Division and the Derivatives Market Division. Korean Wikipedia adds a separate clearing and settlement division set up in April 2021, and KONEX, a market for early-stage small companies opened in July 2013.

The main market’s benchmark is the KOSPI, the Korea Composite Stock Price Index. English Wikipedia says it was introduced in 1983 with a base value of 100 as of 4 January 1980, and is weighted by market capitalisation. The KOSPI 200, announced on 15 June 1994 according to Korean Wikipedia, became the base for the country’s first index futures in May 1996 and index options in July 1997.

KOSDAQ began as a separate market. English Wikipedia says it was set up in 1996 by the body now called the Korea Financial Investment Association, as an electronic market modelled on the American Nasdaq, and that it went into full service on 1 July 1996. Korean Wikipedia describes it today as a market for technology and biotechnology companies and growing smaller firms.

The exchange’s later additions read like a list of new asset classes: an exchange-traded fund market in October 2002, single-stock futures in 2008, lean-hog futures the same year, a gold market in March 2014 and exchange-traded notes in November 2014, according to Korean Wikipedia. It has also worked abroad: the same source records stakes in the securities markets of Laos, opened in 2011, and Cambodia, opened in 2012, and offices in London from May 2025 and New York from September 2025. English Wikipedia notes that the exchange joined the United Nations Sustainable Stock Exchanges initiative on 22 May 2015.

How exchanges present themselves.

Stock exchanges sell something that cannot be held: access to a market. Most of their public image is therefore built from rituals, rooms and numbers rather than products. One common ritual is the ceremony around the opening or closing of trading. Borsa İstanbul, for example, says it announces the start and end of each session by ringing a bell symbolically, offers bell-ringing ceremonies to listed companies and other organisations, and hands guests a crystal gong hammer as a keepsake.

Rooms come next. Older exchanges often began in borrowed spaces: the Shanghai Stock Exchange reopened in 1990 in the ballroom of a hotel on the Bund before moving to a purpose-built tower in Pudong. Exchanges also show off their trading floors and technology: Borsa İstanbul lists a renewed trading floor and a primary data centre among its milestones. Exchange buildings themselves, from façades to statues at the entrance, become part of the identity.

Numbers carry the rest. Index names such as the SSE Composite or the BIST 100 work as brands in their own right, quoted daily in news reports and printed on tickers and screens. Listing ceremonies supply the backdrops that newly listed companies use in their own announcements, and cross-border links such as Stock Connect give exchanges a story to tell about reach.

Exchanges also publish a great deal: annual and integrated reports, investor-education material and milestone timelines. This guide uses those documents alongside independent dated sources, and marks clearly where a fact rests only on the exchange’s own account. The palettes and typefaces shown are unofficial interpretations, not the exchanges’ own marks.

An exchange owned by its industry.

Korea Exchange is not a listed company. Korean Wikipedia says that at the end of 2015 its paid-in capital was held by 40 corporate shareholders, mainly securities and futures companies, each holding between 0.07 and 5 percent. Its status has been argued over: on 29 January 2009 the Ministry of Strategy and Finance designated it a public institution, a decision the exchange and its union contested in later years, as Korean Wikipedia records with dated reports from Yonhap and others.

The newest change is to the trading day. On 14 September 2026 the exchange opened its first after-hours session, The Korea Times reported from Yonhap the next day: KOSPI and KOSDAQ stocks could be traded in real time for four hours, from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., after the regular session from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Until then, evening trading had been available only on Nextrade, an alternative trading system. Exchange-traded funds and notes were excluded from the new session, and daily price limits and circuit breakers still applied. A KRX official told Yonhap the move was meant to lay the groundwork for competition with global markets.

The split between Busan and Seoul is part of the identity. Korean Wikipedia says the head office moved to Busan with the 2005 merger and now sits in the Busan International Finance Center, while the Seoul office remains on Yeouido, where the exchange has been since 1979.

For a design guide, Korea Exchange shows how a market operator’s identity is carried less by a building than by its index names — KOSPI and KOSDAQ are better known on screens than the company behind them. Compare Japan Exchange Group, another merged Asian operator, and HKEX. For this guide we use a navy, a pale screen grey and a muted red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Korea Exchange’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.