Korea Institutional Tracker - August Week 4 This week the institutional story moved onto the balance sheets. Two brokerages built out tokenized-securities rails, a TradFi asset manager put fresh capital into a crypto exchange, and a regional bank went live on Ripple's cross-border rails. Four fronts: 1. SECURITIES · Meritz Securities to Expand Its Tokenized-Securities Business Meritz Securities said on August 20 it will expand its tokenized-securities business, joining the widening group of Korean brokerages treating security-token offerings as core infrastructure rather than a pilot. The move positions domestic houses to issue and distribute tokenized real-world assets once the STO legal framework is finalized. <> 2. TOKENIZATION · NH Investment & Securities Joins Koscom's STO Platform NH Investment & Securities signed on August 13 to join Koscom's shared tokenized-securities platform. Koscom, the Korea Exchange's IT arm, runs the market-utility layer that lets brokerages issue, register and trade STOs without each building the rails alone, and NH is one of the larger houses to plug into the common infrastructure ahead of a formal regime. <> 3. M&A · Mirae Asset Injects Won 50B Into the Korbit Operator Mirae Asset injected about 50 billion won, roughly 36 million dollars, into the company behind the Korbit exchange, one of Korea's oldest licensed venues. Fresh capital from a traditional asset-management giant deepens TradFi ownership of domestic exchange infrastructure and signals that regulated crypto trading is becoming a mainstream asset-management adjacency. <> 4. PAYMENTS · Jeonbuk Bank Taps Ripple for Cross-Border Payments Ripple partnered with Jeonbuk Bank on August 18 to make it the first Korean regional bank to run Ripple Payments for international remittances, settling cross-border transfers in seconds to minutes rather than the multi-day cycles of correspondent banking. The service targets the province's import-export firms, IT startups and content creators, and marks Ripple's third Korean institutional deal of 2026 after Kbank custody and Kyobo Life bond-tokenization work. <>