Mirae Asset Brand Guidelines: A 1997 Seoul Start-Up, Daewoo Securities and Global X

An advisory firm, a fund and a brokerage.

Mirae Asset began in Seoul in 1997. English Wikipedia says the group was founded that year by Park Hyeon-joo, and the group’s own timeline, published on its website in 2026, opens with Mirae Asset Venture Capital in July 1997 and Mirae Asset Investment Advisory in August 1997. The two accounts differ on the names of those first companies — English Wikipedia speaks of Mirae Asset Global Investments and Mirae Asset Capital — but agree on the year and the founder.

A fund followed. In December 1998 the asset-management arm launched Park Hyeon Joo No. 1, a fund named after its founder. The group’s timeline calls it the first mutual fund in Korea; English Wikipedia describes it as the country’s first retail mutual fund. A 2010 Harvard Business School case study, English Wikipedia adds, carried the title “Mirae Asset: Korea’s Mutual Fund Pioneer.”

The brokerage came next. The group dates Mirae Asset Securities to December 1999, and English Wikipedia gives the same year. Over the following decade the company’s timeline records a run of products it describes as firsts in Korea: a wrap account in February 2001, an instalment savings fund in February 2004 and, in February 2010, a mobile trading service for smartphones — the kind of app Korean brokers call an MTS. The securities company listed its shares on the main board of the Korea Exchange in February 2006, according to the same timeline.

The group also grew by buying other firms. English Wikipedia lists SK Investment Trust in 2004 and SK Life Insurance in 2005, and the group says it bought the Canadian ETF manager Horizons ETFs in November 2011; in May 2024 Horizons was renamed Global X Canada.

Daewoo, Global X and a new name.

The largest step was a merger. English Wikipedia says Daewoo Securities was founded in 1970 as part of the Daewoo conglomerate, was spun off from Daewoo Corporation in 1999 and later came under the state-owned Korea Development Bank. In January 2016 Mirae Asset Securities won the bidding for a 43 percent stake in Daewoo Securities, and the combined company was launched in December 2016 as Mirae Asset Daewoo, according to the group’s timeline.

That name lasted just over four years. In March 2021 Mirae Asset Daewoo changed its name to Mirae Asset Securities; English Wikipedia gives the date as 24 March 2021, and the group timeline records the same change.

Abroad, the group’s ETF brand is Global X. The ETF issuer says on its website that it has issued ETFs since 2008, launched its first fund in 2009 and that “Mirae Asset acquired Global X in 2018”; the group’s timeline dates the purchase, by Mirae Asset Global Investments, to July 2018. Global X now names itself a member of Mirae Asset Financial Group.

The securities company has its own foreign units. The group timeline lists a Hong Kong subsidiary from January 2007, a Brazilian one from August 2010, the European ETF market maker GHCO, bought in May 2023, and Mirae Asset Sharekhan, launched in India in November 2024. Japan is the next step. The Korea Herald reported on 29 October 2026 that the board of Mirae Asset Securities had approved buying Sanko Securities, a Tokyo brokerage founded in 1953 and owned by Okasan Securities Group, through its US subsidiary, with the final terms set at closing and subject to regulatory approval. The deal was agreed in October 2026 and was not completed at the time of writing; the paper said a retail service in Japan was targeted for 2027 or 2028.

Design and documentation.

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.

From M-STOCK to Mirae Asset Portfolio Service.

For retail customers the brand also lives in an app. On 1 October 2026 the Herald Corporation’s business site reported that Mirae Asset Securities was renaming its mobile trading app M-STOCK as MAPS, short for Mirae Asset Portfolio Service, and relaunching it as a broader investment platform. Existing users moved over through an update rather than a new download. Korea was the second market for MAPS: the group’s timeline says its Hong Kong subsidiary unveiled the platform in June 2026.

The name has a history inside the firm. According to the same report, in the early days of Mirae Asset Securities the specialists who helped customers allocate assets and manage portfolios were called MAPS, and the app carries that idea onto the phone. The report describes a home screen built around two sections, “Discover” and “My Investments,” a simplified price chart, and a digital-asset menu split into “Market” and “Insight.” It ties the rename to the group’s longer-term plan, which it calls “Mirae Asset 3.0.”

Research is part of the same picture. The group says Mirae Asset Securities set up an AI research centre in March 2026, which it describes as a first among Korean securities firms, and its list of awards includes a place in Interbrand’s 2022 ranking of Korean brands. Those are the company’s own statements.

For a design guide, Mirae Asset shows how a financial group can carry one family name across a fund house, a brokerage, an insurer and an ETF brand abroad, while the brokerage’s own name has changed twice in five years. Compare it with Samsung Securities, part of a much larger group, and Korea Investment & Securities. For this guide we use an ember orange, a harbour navy and an apricot mist with a clean sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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