Hanwha Life Brand Guidelines: Korea Life of 1946, the 63 Building and a 2012 Rename

A Seoul insurer from 1946 and a tower on Yeouido.

Hanwha Life began in Seoul on 9 September 1946 as Korea Life Insurance (대한생명보험), with its first address near Namdaemun in the centre of the city. The company calls it Korea’s first life insurance company, and Korean Wikipedia uses the same description. The English name “Korea Life” was adopted in 1987, Korean Wikipedia says, when the company joined the Swiss Life network.

Its ownership followed the swings of Korea’s economy. In 1969, facing default, the company passed under the management of the Shin Dong-A Group, according to Korean Wikipedia. In May 1985 it completed the 63 Building on Yeouido, Seoul’s financial island, built by the group’s construction company, and moved its head office there, opening a medical examination centre in the building at the same time; the company says the tower was then the tallest building in Asia. When Shin Dong-A collapsed in 1999, the state-owned Korea Deposit Insurance Corporation took control, and Korea Life became a state-run insurer, Korean Wikipedia says.

In December 2002 Korea Life was brought into the Hanwha Group, the company’s own history records, and by April 2008, it says, it had cleared its accumulated deficit in full. Hanwha wanted to rename it, but the deposit insurance corporation opposed the change, according to Korean Wikipedia, so the Korea Life name stayed for another decade. The company listed its shares on the Korean securities market in March 2010, and on 8 October 2012 Korea Life became Hanwha Life, announcing a new vision: “a global insurance company growing alongside its customers.”

Protection, pensions, start-ups and an esports team.

Hanwha Life sells a broad range. Korean and English Wikipedia list its main products as whole life and CI policies, savings-type policies such as annuities, and variable products, with trusts for personal asset management and, for employers, retirement pensions, accident and group insurance. It sells through face-to-face financial planners, through bank branches under bancassurance, and through Onsure, an online channel the company says it launched in August 2013. In April 2021 the sales and recruitment arm was split off as Hanwha Life Financial Service, Korean Wikipedia says.

Abroad, the company says it began operating in Vietnam in April 2009 as the first Korean insurer there, opened Sino-Korea Life, a joint venture in China, in December 2012, and started Hanwha Life Indonesia in October 2013. It set up a New York subsidiary in July 2005 and signed a memorandum of understanding with Indonesia’s Lippo Group in November 2022, and it now lists Vietnam, China, Indonesia, the US, Japan and the UAE among its markets. In July 2025 it completed the purchase of a 75 per cent stake in the US clearing and settlement firm Velocity Clearing, Securities Finance Times reported; the company said the deal made it the first Korean insurer to acquire a US securities firm.

Hanwha Life also puts its name on culture, start-ups and sport. The company says it opened DREAMPLUS 63, a fintech start-up centre, in October 2016, followed by DREAMPLUS Gangnam in 2018, and launched the Hanwha Life Esports club in April 2018. That League of Legends team won the 2026 Mid-Season Invitational in Daejeon in July, beating China’s Bilibili Gaming 3–2 for the first MSI title in the team’s history, The Korea Herald reported. By its own account the company also stages a “Signature RUN” event and, in 2023, put its LIFEPLUS name on the International Crown golf event.

How Asian life insurers present themselves.

Asian life insurers tend to present themselves in a recognisable way. Wordmarks are usually short and set in warm, open sans-serif letters, often a single company name or a set of initials that can sit on an app icon, a branch fascia and a policy document without changing. Palettes lean on red, orange and blue, colours that read clearly on screens and signs, with plenty of white space around them.

Photography does much of the emotional work. Families, couples, children and older parents appear far more often than buildings or products, and health and everyday activity are recurring themes. Product pages are usually organised by need rather than by policy name: protection, savings, health and retirement, each with its own short explanation and a route to an adviser or an online quote.

Two audiences sit side by side on most of these sites. Customers are offered apps, service hotlines, online claims and, increasingly, wellness and senior-care programmes linked to their cover. Prospective agents are offered recruitment pages that describe training, career paths and the role of the adviser, since agents and partner banks remain important sales channels for many of these companies.

Behind the consumer pages sits a heavier layer of corporate publishing. Listed insurers produce annual reports, interim results and sustainability reports, often in two or more languages, and these documents carry the most formal version of the identity: the full logo, a restricted palette, long-form charts and governance pages. For a designer, studying both layers together shows how one identity stretches from a friendly app screen to a dense, regulated report.

Three circles and a LIFEPLUS layer.

The visual identity is the group’s. Hanwha Life uses the Hanwha Tricircle, a symbol of three circles that the company describes as expanding and growing without limit, standing for the group’s core values, its vision and its three business areas; the company dates the group’s new corporate identity to January 2007. Alongside it, the Hanwha financial companies — the life insurer, the general insurer, the securities house, the asset manager and the savings bank — share a consumer brand, LIFEPLUS, which Korean Wikipedia says frames a full life around four elements: financial, physical, mental and inspirational well-being.

The 63 Building remains the brand’s landmark. The company’s address is the 63 Hanwha Life Building, and in June 2026 the tower reopened after a renovation as a cultural and lifestyle complex, The Korea Herald reported in September. The revamp centres on Pompidou Center Hanwha, whose opening show was devoted to the Cubists, brings in 25 new food, beverage and lifestyle tenants, and turns the 60th-floor observation deck into 63 Sky Picnic, about 250 metres above the ground; the insurer told the paper that about 300,000 people visited in the first 100 days.

For a design guide, Hanwha Life shows how a financial brand can sit inside a group identity while owning a skyscraper, a sports team and a lifestyle label of its own. Compare Samsung Life, another Seoul life insurer with a group parent, and Cathay Life, a Taipei insurer that shares its holding company’s symbol. For this guide we use a warm orange, a rust and a sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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