Meritz Securities

Meritz Securities is a South Korean securities and financial-investment company established in 1973 as Hanil Securities. It provides brokerage, trading, investment banking, institutional sales, research, and merchant-banking services, and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Meritz Financial Group.^[1][2][3]

The company is headquartered at Three IFC in Seoul. Its business spans securities and derivatives markets as well as corporate finance, project finance, asset-backed securities, and investment-management services.^[4][5]

History

Founding and Early Expansion

Hanil Securities was established on February 24, 1973, with paid-in capital of KRW 500 million, and began operations that April. It was renamed Hanjin Investment & Securities in October 1990, and its shares were listed on the Korea Stock Exchange in January 1992. In April 2000, it separated from Hanjin Group and changed its name to Meritz Securities the following month.^[2]​^[6]​^[3]​^[1]​

During the 1990s and early 2000s, the firm added services and licenses in areas including international and foreign-exchange business, mergers and acquisitions, futures, investment advisory, and discretionary investment management. It introduced cyber trading in April 1997, an internet investment-information system in January 1999, and its A-Net Speed and A-Net Pro home-trading programs in October 1999. Kyobo-Meritz First CR-REITs received Korea’s first license of its kind in November 2001.^[3]​ It also expanded into insurance-related distribution through the introduction of bancassurance in December 2004.^[6]​

Mergers and Organizational Changes

Meritz Securities acquired Meritz Investment Bank as a subsidiary in 2006 and merged it into the company on April 1, 2010, following approval in December 2009. The merger expanded the firm’s investment-banking activities; it was designated a comprehensive financial investment business entity in November 2017, which enabled it to provide credit to corporations. Its comprehensive-finance license expired in April 2020, and it returned to the Meritz Securities name that month.^[6]​^[2]​^[3]​^[4]​

In June 2015, the company merged with I'M Investment & Securities, a subsidiary incorporated in December 2014 after regulatory approval. In April 2017, Meritz Capital became Meritz Securities’ wholly owned subsidiary through a comprehensive stock exchange. In April 2023, Meritz Securities itself became a wholly owned subsidiary of Meritz Financial Group through a comprehensive stock exchange.^[6]​^[3]​^[2]​

The company underwent significant branch consolidation, reducing its network from 31 branches to 20 in 2012 and then to five in 2014. It also reorganized several locations as finance centers, including centers serving Seoul, Daegu, and Busan.^[6]​

Leadership

Chang Won Jae became CEO and president in November 2023. In July 2024, Kim Jong Min was appointed executive vice president and CEO, establishing a co-CEO structure.^[3]​^[7]​^[4]​

Business and Services

Meritz Securities’ activities include brokerage and research, global trading, institutional sales, investment banking, and merchant banking. Its brokerage business facilitates investor trading in domestic and overseas stocks, bonds, and derivatives. Its research unit analyzes economic and financial-market trends and produces market forecasts. Global trading includes proprietary securities trading and the development and management of structured derivatives.^[5]

Institutional sales serves corporate clients through securities and derivatives brokerage and trading, sales of financial instruments, and the handling and underwriting of short-term financial instruments. Investment banking supports companies through underwriting and offering financial-investment instruments, mergers-and-acquisitions advice, corporate restructuring and non-performing-loan consulting, real-estate project financing, and management of asset-backed securities, which are backed by financial assets.^[5][7]

Merchant banking activities include promissory-note services, cash-management accounts used to manage cash, project and ship finance, leasing, and management of securitization assets. Project finance is financing tied to a specific project. The company also reports activities in project-finance lending, loan arranging, corporate-finance lending, guarantees, syndicated-loan agency, and new-technology business finance. Its authorized activities include securities and derivatives dealing and brokerage, trust business, and investment advisory and discretionary investment management.^[5][7]

The company’s ancillary activities include voluntary carbon-credit trading and over-the-counter transactions, authorized in August 2023, and proprietary emissions-credit trading, authorized in December 2021.^[7]

Subsidiaries and Investment Activities

Meritz Capital, which Meritz Securities owns outright, conducts installment financing and facilities leasing and entered the new-technology financial business in 2014. At year-end 2024, Meritz Capital reported assets of KRW 8.9 trillion and net income of KRW 134.853 billion.^[2]

The wider consolidated group includes investment funds and structured entities used for investments, lending, and asset securitization. Disclosed investments include real-estate-related loans and property in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India; a hydroelectric plant in Indonesia; and North American oil-and-gas and midstream businesses. The group also consolidates entities established to securitize finance-lease assets and vehicles that hold or administer asset-backed securities.^[2]

Partnerships

Ripple Partnership

On October 14, 2026, Meritz and Ripple announced a strategic partnership to explore bringing Ripple Custody and Ripple’s tokenization infrastructure into South Korea’s capital markets. Ripple describes Ripple Custody as a digital-asset custody platform for regulated financial institutions, designed to support the storage, transfer, and settlement of digital assets. The companies said the initial work would remain within Meritz’s existing securities business and South Korea’s current regulatory framework, with cooperation potentially expanding as regulation develops.^[8]​^[11]​

Meritz said it was exploring opportunities including spot exchange-traded funds, fractional investment, security tokens, digital-asset trading platforms, and Korean-won-denominated stablecoins. Ripple described Meritz as its first South Korean securities-firm partner and its fourth institutional partner in the country in 2026. Its other named Korean partners were Kyobo Life Insurance, Kbank, and Jeonbuk Bank, in work involving custody, tokenized-bond settlement, wallet infrastructure, or cross-border payments.^[8]​^[11]​

Canton Network Memorandum

In early October 2026, Meritz and the Canton Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding to examine tokenization of South Korean financial assets and possible institutional applications of the Canton Network. Their study areas include developing regulatory-aligned business models for domestic assets, assessing Canton’s privacy-enabled infrastructure for the Korean capital market, and considering tokenized assets as institutional collateral. They also plan to explore, with global institutional partners, cross-border tokenization potentially involving sovereign-grade debt and the use of tokenized high-quality liquid assets as collateral across trading and clearing ecosystems.^[9]​^[10]​

The Canton Network is an institutional public blockchain developed by Digital Asset with sub-transaction privacy. The memorandum describes an exploratory study rather than a specific security, transaction, service, or deployment. Meritz said it would proceed incrementally as South Korea’s digital-asset regulatory framework develops.^[10]​^[9]​

Recognition

Meritz Securities received the gold prize at the Dasan Finance Awards in January 2002, an excellent chief company prize from the Korea Stock Exchange in December 2002, and a grand award at the Maeil Business Newspaper Financial Product Award in March 2003.^[3]