KB Securities Brand Guidelines: Kukil Securities of 1962, Hyundai and a 2017 Merger

A 1962 broker that became Hyundai Securities.

KB Securities carries the corporate line of Hyundai Securities, whose history starts long before the KB name. Korean Wikipedia says the firm was founded in June 1962 as Kukil Securities, listed on the stock exchange in September 1975 and joined the Hyundai Group in September 1977. It was renamed Hyundai Securities in June 1986. It later set up an asset-management company in 2009 and a savings bank in 2011, both since sold, the same article says.

The Hyundai era ended in a sale. In December 2013 Hyundai Group, then short of liquidity, decided to sell the brokerage, Korean Wikipedia says; in January 2015 the Japanese-affiliated private-equity firm Orix PE was chosen as preferred bidder, and in October 2015 it told Hyundai Group it was withdrawing. In 2016 the business went instead to KB Financial Group, the holding company formed from Kookmin Bank in 2008. English Wikipedia says KB took over Hyundai Securities after beating Korea Investment and the Hong Kong private-equity firm Actis, and KB Financial’s own timeline records Hyundai Securities joining the group in May 2016. In November 2016 it became a wholly owned subsidiary and its shares were delisted, Korean Wikipedia says.

The new name came on 1 January 2017, when Hyundai Securities and KB Financial’s existing brokerage, KB Investment & Securities, were merged as KB Securities; Korean Wikipedia dates the integration of their computer systems to 15 May 2017. The article describes the combination as joining Hyundai’s wealth-management and sales-and-trading strengths with KB Investment & Securities’ investment-banking and wholesale business.

H-able, M-able and an IPO league table.

KB Securities’ website names its trading platforms as one family: H-able for the home trading system on a desktop, and M-able, M-able Mini and M-able Wide for mobile. Its page titles carry two lines of its own, translated here from Korean: “the nation’s lifetime investment partner” and “finance is shopping too.” KB Financial’s timeline adds that in 2023 KB Securities opened a U.S.-stock service called KB Securities Direct Indexing, and that in 2024 M-able Mini launched “Stock AI,” a conversational service the group calls the first AI-based one in the securities industry.

Investment banking is where independent coverage is clearest. Chosun Biz reported in August 2026 that, according to industry data, KB Securities topped the league table for Korean initial public offerings in 2022, ranked fifth in 2023, came first again in both 2024 and 2025, and stood third at the end of the first half of 2026. The paper said its underwriting mandates included HD Hyundai Robotics and Musinsa, and that it had been selected as listing underwriter for Rebellions, an AI semiconductor design company, with the contract still in preparation.

The firm has also gone abroad, mostly to Vietnam. KB Financial’s timeline records the purchase of Maritime Securities in Vietnam in 2017, the launch of KBSV as the Vietnamese subsidiary in 2018 and of KB Fina, a Vietnamese digital financial platform, in 2021, and a representative office in Mumbai in 2025. At home it lists Global One Market, a service for trading foreign shares in Korean won, launched in 2019; authorisation for short-term finance business the same year; and Prime Center, a digital asset-management service, in 2020.

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 star, a typeface and five friends.

The visual identity comes from the group. KB Financial Group says its Star-b symbol is shaped like a star and expresses “forward-looking thinking,” and that its Korean and English logotypes are drawn in KB’s own typeface. That typeface, KB Financial Font, has a display family in Bold, Medium, Medium Italic and Light, which the group says uses straight lines to convey trustworthiness and curved lines to convey friendliness, and a text family drawn in a square-frame style for body copy. The group’s mascots, the Star Friends, are five characters: KiKi the rabbit, A.GO the duck, B.B the bear, Lamu the llama and Kolly the broccoli, each said to have come from a different star. KB Financial held the characters’ first exhibition in 2023, its timeline says, and KB Securities’ home page carries them too.

English Wikipedia lists KB Securities among the subsidiaries of KB Financial Group, alongside Kookmin Bank, KB Insurance and KB Kookmin Card.

There is a regulatory record. On 4 November 2026 the Financial Services Commission finalised penalties against seven banks and six securities firms, including KB Securities and the group’s Kookmin Bank, for mis-selling equity-linked securities and trusts tied to the Hong Kong H-share index, in breach of the Financial Consumer Protection Act, the Seoul Economic Daily and Kyunghyang Shinmun reported. The commission found that products had been sold without back-testing results that showed the risk and with simplified explanations of how they paid out; the Seoul Economic Daily wrote that the dispute could move to administrative litigation.

For a design guide, KB Securities shows how a broker with a 1962 history can take on a parent group’s star symbol, typeface and characters. Compare Korea Investment & Securities, which competed for Hyundai Securities in 2016, and Samsung Securities, another Seoul broker inside a larger group. For this guide we use a warm yellow, slate and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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