Biography|Lee Yong-bae — The March AGM in This Yeouido Hall That Made Him Chief

On 17 March 2017 HMC Investment Securities held its regular shareholders' meeting in the Yeouido headquarters at 28 Gukjegeumyung-ro 2-gil.

The meeting confirmed Lee Yong-bae as representative director and president.

He had been inside the firm only since the previous May, as vice president for sales.

The same meeting approved a change of articles so that, from 1 July 2017, the house would trade under a Hyundai name again.

After Hyundai Securities vanished into KB, the two syllables had dropped off the brokerage map.

Lee's first full year as chief was spent putting them back on the door.

The registered office of the firm is still this block of Yeouido.

Korean business desks in 2017 framed the vote as a group finance man taking a securities house he had not grown up in.

What followed was less a trading-floor legend than a balance-sheet job: contingent liabilities were cut, and the renamed Hyundai Motor Securities posted rising operating profit across 2017 and 2018.

Company profiles compiled in 2019 still listed him as the president who had arrived without a broker's résumé and then spent three years on risk and the nameplate.

He left the chair in March 2020 for Hyundai Rotem.

The AGM date is the clean public mark of the securities chapter.

A visitor on Gukjegeumyung-ro 2-gil is looking at the same office mass the shareholders entered that March.

The island around it is Seoul's fund and brokerage quarter, with the National Assembly at the western end and the 63 Building on the skyline.

Lee's desk was never a tourist stop.

The moment that can be pinned is the vote in this building that put his name on the securities licence and reopened a Hyundai sign on Yeouido.

Photo: Ox1997cow, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Yeouido from Dongjak Bridge, 26 July 2023.