NH Investment & Securities Brand Guidelines: Hanbo 1969, LG, Woori & a NongHyup Merger

Six names in four decades.

Korean Wikipedia dates its founding to January 1969, as Hanbo Securities; English Wikipedia also gives 1969 and the Hanbo name. In July 1975 the firm became Daebo Securities, and it was listed on 30 September 1975, Korean Wikipedia says. In July 1982 it was renamed Lucky Securities.

In March 1995 it was renamed LG Securities, and in October 1999 LG Investment & Securities. The LG group was its largest shareholder until May 2004, when that role passed to LG Card, and in December 2004 the company was taken into the Woori Financial Group, according to Korean Wikipedia.

In April 2005 LG Investment & Securities combined with Woori Securities and took the name Woori Investment & Securities. English Wikipedia dates the merger to 1 April 2005, and the capital-markets outlet Jabon Sijang News described the 2005 launch in the same terms in November 2026. Under that name the firm spent almost a decade inside the Woori group.

The next change came with privatisation. Yonhap reported on 12 June 2014 that Woori Investment & Securities and two other Woori units had been for sale since 2010 under the government’s plan to privatise Woori Finance Holdings; that NongHyup Financial Group had been picked as preferred bidder in December 2013; and that NongHyup’s board had approved the acquisition that day, with a combined brokerage due before the end of the year. The firm merged with NH NongHyup Securities and took the name NH Investment & Securities. English Wikipedia dates the merger to 31 December 2014; Korean Wikipedia dates the merged firm’s launch to January 2015.

NongHyup, QV and Namuh.

The letters NH come from NongHyup, the Korean agricultural cooperative federation. English Wikipedia names the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation as the parent, and Korean Wikipedia describes the broker as the securities company of NH NongHyup Financial Group, under the federation. The head office is in the Parc1 tower in Yeouido, Seoul, the building Korean Wikipedia names as Parc1 NH Financial Tower.

The firm has used more than one sub-brand. In 2016 it attached the letters QV to retail services: Dailian reported in June 2016 that it had added individual savings account functions to its “QV Pension” mobile app, letting customers choose an account type and plan savings goals in the app.

The same month it launched Namuh (나무, the Korean word for tree). Digital Times reported on 7 June 2016 that NH Investment & Securities had introduced Namuh as a mobile securities brand, which the company called the first of its kind from a Korean brokerage. It was aimed at investors in their twenties and thirties, and the company explained the name through a tree growing into a forest, in the way small investments might grow. The launch used customers’ mobile phone numbers as their cash-management account numbers, a “One Minute” app for opening accounts, a Namuh app for phones and a Namuh home trading system for the PC, with its own Facebook account and Naver blog.

Ten years on, the name is still in use. Asia Economy reported on 1 October 2026 that the company’s mobile investment platform is called Namuh Securities (나무증권) and that its second-half campaign starred Sullyoon of the group NMIXX as a seonnyeo, a heavenly maiden, bringing benefits to Namuh customers, who are called namukkun, the Korean word for woodcutter.

How Korean brokers present themselves.

Korean securities firms present themselves in two languages at once. Their names usually appear in Hangul and in English side by side, on websites, in apps and on annual reports, and many of the larger houses carry the name of a wider financial group — Mirae Asset, Samsung, NH, KB or Hanwha — in front of the word for securities. Their wordmarks tend to rely on a single strong colour, and orange, blue, yellow and green all appear across the sector.

Most of a broker’s daily contact with customers now happens on screens. The industry has its own shorthand for them: an MTS, or mobile trading system, is the phone app, and an HTS, or home trading system, is the desktop program that came before it. The apps are named products in their own right. Samsung Securities calls its app mPOP, and Mirae Asset Securities renamed its M-STOCK app MAPS in 2026, describing the change as a shift from order-taking towards portfolio advice.

Beyond the trading screens, the websites follow a familiar pattern. Pages for overseas shares sit next to pages for retirement pensions; The Korea Herald noted in 2026 that Korean retail investors have expanded their investments in overseas markets. Each large house also runs a research centre whose analyst reports feed the apps, the websites and the firm’s institutional clients, and some now present that research with AI tools.

The formal record lives in reports. Listed brokers publish annual reports and, increasingly, sustainability or integrated reports in Korean and English, alongside disclosures to the Financial Supervisory Service. For a design reader these documents, more than any advertising, show how each firm sets its type, colour and tables when it speaks to shareholders and regulators.

A cooperative’s broker on the Korea Exchange.

The firm’s recent record includes a long legal dispute. The Optimus fund case came to light in 2020, when funds run by Optimus Asset Management suspended redemptions; NH Investment & Securities had been their largest distributor, The Asia Business Daily reported in May 2026. In March 2022 the Financial Services Commission imposed a three-month partial suspension of business, covering new private-fund sales, for breaching the Capital Markets Act’s rules on investment solicitation, Chosunbiz and The Asia Business Daily reported. The company challenged the sanctions in court. The first-instance court ruled in its favour in July 2023, the appeal court agreed, and in May 2026 the Supreme Court upheld those rulings, so the sanctions were cancelled.

The Woori name has since returned to Korean securities, but on a different company. Jabon Sijang News reported in November 2026 that the name Woori Investment & Securities, which disappeared in 2014, came back in August 2024 for a new firm formed by merging Woori Jonghap Geumyung and Korea Foss Securities. It is a separate company from NH Investment & Securities.

NH Investment & Securities is listed on the Korea Exchange, and English Wikipedia calls it one of the largest securities firms in Korea, offering wealth management, investment banking, brokerage and merchant banking.

For a design guide, NH Investment & Securities shows how a broker with six earlier names can carry a parent’s initials on the company and give its app a plain, friendly word of its own. Compare Kiwoom Securities, an online broker that named its software Hero, and Samsung Securities. For this guide we use a field blue, a harvest gold and a leaf green on warm paper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep NH Investment & Securities’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.