Kim Hyo-bong

About

Kim Hyo-bong is a Korean lawyer. She holds an LL.B. from Yonsei University, completed the Judicial Research and Training Institute in 2012, earned an LL.M. from Columbia Law School and completed a professional MBA at Sungkyunkwan University. She began her career in the compliance team at Hyundai Motor Securities before spending about 11 years at the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), where she worked on fund and trust rules, private equity fund dispute mediation and digital finance.

She joined Bae, Kim & Lee (BKL) in July 2024 and is a partner in its digital finance and virtual assets practice and a member of its Future Finance Strategy Center. Her work covers VASP registration filings, responses to inspections and sanctions, AML audits and advice on stablecoin payment services and tokenised financial products. She sits on the FSC's public-private security token council, the Financial Security Institute's security advisory committee and the Democratic Party's Digital Asset Task Force, and was an advisory member of the Bank of Korea's Money & Banking Future Forum.

At the FSS she was part of the first dedicated virtual asset team from 2022, in the Digital Finance Innovation Department and then the Virtual Asset Supervision Department, working on the Virtual Asset User Protection Act, its subordinate rules and the exchanges' self-regulation on listings. At BKL she gave legislative advice on Rep. Lee Kang-il's digital asset market bill and co-authored two Hashed Open Research reports on a won stablecoin legislative framework (2025). She writes a column for Digital Asset and argues that Korea should clarify which crypto activities licensed financial firms may carry out and set rules for foreign-issued stablecoins.