Hanwha Investment & Securities Brand Guidelines: Seongdo of 1962 and a 2012 Merger

A 1962 brokerage and a 1976 group purchase.

Hanwha Investment & Securities is the brokerage of the Hanwha group, and its legal entity dates from 19 July 1962, when it was founded as Seongdo Securities, according to Korean Wikipedia’s company history. In May 1976 it was acquired by the Korea Explosives group, the group now called Hanwha, and in November 1977 it was renamed Cheil Securities. Its shares were listed on the Korea Stock Exchange in November 1985, and it is still a listed company in Seoul.

The firm went abroad early. Korean Wikipedia records a New York office opened in August 1989 and a Tokyo office in March 1992, and lists the acquisition of a bank in Greece in January 1993 and of a bank in Hungary in January 1996. In October 1996 Cheil Securities took the group’s name and became Hanwha Securities; an office in Shanghai followed in March 2003.

The present name came from a second company. In June 2010 Hanwha Securities acquired Prudential Investment & Securities together with Prudential Asset Management, Korean Wikipedia says. That brokerage had a long history of its own: it was founded in June 1982 as Kookmin Investment Trust, became Kookmin Investment Trust Securities in February 1997, Hyundai Investment Trust Securities in March 1999 and Prudential Investment & Securities in February 2004, according to Korean Wikipedia’s separate article on it, which lists it among the former subsidiaries of both the Hyundai group and Hanwha.

Two Hanwha brokerages become one.

Inside Hanwha, the acquired brokerage was renamed Hanwha Investment & Securities in November 2011. In September 2012 the two Hanwha brokerages merged. The combined company took the newer name, Hanwha Investment & Securities, while the 1962 company, Hanwha Securities, remained the surviving legal entity, Korean Wikipedia says; that is why its founding date is given as 1962 although the name dates from 2011.

The firm then grew within the group. In December 2017 it took over the business of Hanwha Investment, another Hanwha company, and in July 2021 it set up an ESG committee, Korean Wikipedia records. The same article lists Hanwha Asset Management and its related parties as the largest shareholders, with about 46 per cent of the shares, citing Joseilbo in December 2023. Its head office is in the Hanwha General Insurance building in Yeouido, Seoul.

Since then its overseas growth has run through Southeast Asia. Hanwha Investment & Securities launched Pinetree Securities in Vietnam in December 2019 and a Pinetree Securities in Singapore in December 2020, according to Korean Wikipedia. By October 2026 The Herald Business described its local presences as Pinetree Securities in Vietnam, Pinetree Securities in Singapore, and Ciptadana Securities and Ciptadana Asset Management in Indonesia.

Korean brokerages and their screens.

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.

Japan and tokenised assets, announced in 2026.

Two announcements in autumn 2026 set out the company’s plans. On 12 October 2026 Hanwha Investment & Securities said it had signed a share purchase agreement to acquire a stake in the securities unit of GI Capital Management, a Japanese financial investment firm, following a board resolution the month before, The Herald Business reported. The deal was agreed in October 2026 and not completed at the time of writing. ChosunBiz described GI Capital Management as a Tokyo-based firm holding Japanese licences for securities brokerage and sales, investment advisory work and discretionary investment management, with a focus on alternative investments that connect global asset managers with institutional investors in Asia; it said the signing took place in Tokyo. The paper said it would give the company a local foothold in Japan, adding to its presences in Vietnam, Singapore and Indonesia, and that the board had also approved a capital raise in September to improve its financial soundness and to pursue designation as a comprehensive financial investment firm.

On 30 October 2026 the company announced a strategic partnership with Chainlink, the US blockchain data-infrastructure company, to build a global digital-asset platform, The Herald Business and Digital Today reported. It adopted Chainlink’s data-standards technology and its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol as the platform’s infrastructure, with plans to tokenise real-world assets for distribution in global markets and to verify their value so they can be used as collateral. According to The Herald Business, a joint working group was to pursue three tasks: institutional on-chain infrastructure linked to custody systems; valuation and reserve-verification standards for real-world assets used as collateral; and compliance and technology standards in line with South Korea’s rules for security tokens.

At home the company also courts individual savers. In May 2026 it announced a campaign, running until the end of June, for new or dormant brokerage-type individual savings accounts (ISA), the tax-advantaged accounts that hold Korean shares, bonds and exchange-traded funds in one place, which customers could open without visiting a branch, ChosunBiz reported.

The brokerage shares the Hanwha name with sister companies such as the life insurer, while its overseas units keep the Pinetree and Ciptadana names.

For a design guide, Hanwha Investment & Securities shows how one group name can be laid over two older brokerages, Seongdo and Kookmin Investment Trust, with very different histories. Compare Hanwha Life, the group’s life insurer, and Meritz Securities, another Seoul brokerage shaped by a group. For this guide we use navy, ink, mist and an ember orange with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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