Biography|Lee Yong-bae — The May Day He Crossed Into This Yeouido Tower as Vice President

On 27 May 2016 Lee Yong-bae left the planning and finance rooms of Hyundai WIA and reported to HMC Investment Securities on Yeouido.

The posting was vice president in charge of sales.

He was fifty-five, a 1961 birth, and he had never run a brokerage.

What he had run was numbers inside Hyundai Motor Group: accounting and management-control rooms at Hyundai Motor, then planning, finance, purchasing and management support as a vice president at Hyundai WIA.

Korean business pages of the period called him a finance specialist and noted an earlier stretch at Hyundai Precision Industry, the old name of Hyundai Mobis, where Chung Mong-koo had taken his own management training.

The building still stands at 28 Gukjegeumyung-ro 2-gil in Yeongdeungpo-gu, a twenty-storey Yeouido office that the securities house has used as its headquarters.

From the street it is one more mid-block tower among the banks and funds of the island.

Inside, the firm was the last Hyundai-branded securities house after the old Hyundai Securities disappeared into KB.

Lee arrived after an internal group audit and a run of weaker quarters under the sitting chief executive.

Trade papers treated the transfer as a signal that the group wanted a tighter grip on a non-core financial subsidiary.

Nine months later the same building would host the annual meeting that made him president.

The May appointment is the hinge: a factory-group controller walking into a dealing room he had not grown up in.

Directories compiled later list a business bachelor's degree from Jeonju University and a business master's from Kyung Hee University.

Those credentials travelled with him.

The work that followed was done on this block of Yeouido, not on a campus.

A visitor today can stand on Gukjegeumyung-ro 2-gil and see the same office mass.

The tenancy has changed hands in the property market since 2016, but Hyundai Motor Securities remains in the building.

Lee himself moved on in 2020.

The day that matters here is the first one, when a group finance man took a desk on the island and the securities house became his problem.

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