Samsung Securities Brand Guidelines: From Hanil Investment & Finance in 1982 to mPOP

A finance company of 1982.

Samsung Securities did not start under the Samsung name. English Wikipedia says the company was established on 19 October 1982 as Hanil Investment & Finance, listed its shares on the Korea Exchange in 1988 and changed its name to Kookje Securities in 1991. In 1992 it was brought into the Samsung Group and renamed Samsung Securities, the name it has kept since.

The firm reached abroad early. English Wikipedia lists offices in London in 1996, New York in 1998 and Hong Kong in 2001, and a merger with Samsung Investment Trust in 2000. It also records that a planned mutual-fund joint venture with J.P. Morgan, set up in 1996, did not go ahead, and that in 2014 the company’s holding in Samsung Asset Management passed to Samsung Life Insurance.

Partnerships with foreign firms are a recurring part of the record. English Wikipedia names agreements with Rothschild & Co in 2008, Neuberger Berman in 2014, KGI Securities in 2016 and Societe Generale in 2018. It describes Samsung Securities as a subsidiary of the Samsung Group and one of the largest securities companies in Korea.

The group link is visible in current reporting. On 28 October 2026 the Herald Corporation’s business site described Samsung Securities as one of four Samsung financial affiliates — with Samsung Life Insurance, Samsung Fire and Samsung Asset Management — that were moving into a shared office in Tokyo, where Samsung Life and Samsung Securities already worked in the same building and were merging their office space. The two companies had handled local market research and project support there, the report said, and the group’s interest in Japan centred on two themes, alternative investments and an ageing population; Samsung Securities was studying how Japanese brokerages approach asset management. Samsung Fire and Samsung Asset Management planned to open their own Tokyo offices in 2027.

The April 2018 dividend error.

In 2018 the company made a back-office mistake that drew wide coverage. According to a Herald Corporation report of 12 August 2026, on the morning of 6 April 2018 an employee processing a dividend for members of the company’s employee stock ownership association chose the wrong option in the payment system. Instead of a cash dividend, about 2.81 billion shares were credited to the members’ accounts. Staff posted warnings on the internal messaging system within minutes and the company froze trading in employee accounts, but some employees sold credited shares before that, and the share price fell by about 11.7 percent that morning, the report says.

Regulators and courts followed. The same report says the Financial Supervisory Service found that the incident came from accumulated failures in internal controls and IT system management and announced sanctions. The National Pension Service, a shareholder at the time, sued for damages. In August 2026 the Supreme Court dismissed appeals from both sides and upheld a lower court’s partial ruling in the pension fund’s favour, limiting damages to the losses it suffered as a shareholder from the fall in the share price.

English Wikipedia dates the event to 8 April 2018; the Herald account, based on the court record, gives 6 April, the date used here. The company bought back shares on the exchange to cover those that had been sold, according to the Herald report.

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.

An app, an omnibus account and a Singapore partner.

The brokerage’s mobile trading app is called mPOP. In December 2025, Chosun Biz reported that Samsung Securities had added a “My Pick” screen to the mPOP home screen. The company said My Pick sorts customers using 64 data points, among them age group, products held, stocks of interest and investment preferences, and shows each person a summary of recently viewed stocks, the day’s investment content, a recent trading log and the latest analyst research reports on the stocks they hold.

Its newest service faces outward. The Korea Herald reported on 12 May 2026 that Samsung Securities had launched a foreign omnibus account service with Interactive Brokers, letting overseas investors trade South Korean shares through Interactive Brokers without opening accounts with a Korean securities firm. The company said the two had discussed the idea since 2023, and the Financial Services Commission approved the service in September 2025 as a designated “innovative financial service,” the paper said.

A second link runs to Singapore. On 2 July 2026 Samsung Securities and the Singapore bank DBS signed a memorandum of understanding to explore a wealth-management partnership, Reuters reported, as carried by The Star. DBS clients would gain access to Samsung Securities products and Samsung Securities clients to DBS global wealth products; the detailed terms were to be agreed later, so the partnership was still pending at the time of writing.

For a design guide, Samsung Securities shows a brokerage that took a group name in 1992 and now presents itself through an app, research reports and cross-border services. Compare it with Samsung, the group’s electronics flagship, and Samsung Life, its insurance affiliate. For this guide we use a ledger blue, a night ink and a pale sky with an even sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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