To that effect, the Office of Exchange, Lending, and Deposits was chartered on 12 December 1811 and established on 1 March 1812 in Turku by Alexander I of Russia, partly modeled on the Bank of Sweden.

On 4 April 1860, Alexander II authorized the Bank of Finland to issue its own denomination, the Finnish markka, defined as a quarter of the Russian paper ruble (and thus nearly equal in value with the French franc at the time).

[5]: 5  In 1865, the Bank of Finland finally secured monetary policy autonomy when Finnish Senator Johan Vilhelm Snellman obtained from Alexander the right to keep the markka linked to the silver standard irrespective of the ruble's situation, which was implemented in March 1866.

From then on, the Bank of Finland effectively set its own monetary policy, making the Grand Duchy a separate currency zone from the rest of the Russian Empire, with the markka fluctuating in the range of 2.79 to 3.60 to the ruble between 1866 and 1875.

To reflect the Bank's new institutional position, plans were made to move it away from its location in the southern wing of the Senate Building in central Helsinki.

[5]: 7  This was implemented in July 1878, when the Bank of Finland unilaterally joined the Latin Monetary Union, a stance it kept until the outbreak of World War I.

[6] Meanwhile, the Russo-Turkish War had again plunged Russia into monetary turmoil, and the ruble remained only partly convertible into markka (coins in small quantities).

The Red Guards occupied the Bank of Finland's head office together with other strategic points of Helsinki in late January 1918 and secured control of the printing presses.

The White side remained in control of the gold reserves, half of the branch network in Finland, and foreign assets, but suffered from a cash shortage as it had no capacity to print banknotes.

[12] After these dramatic events, the Bank of Finland kept facing high inflation, but eventually managed to stabilize the markka in 1923 at about ten percent of its prewar gold value.

During the interwar period, the Bank acquired great prestige in the new country, linked to the leadership of its longstanding governor Risto Ryti who became Prime Minister of Finland in December 1939 and President a year later in the midst of the Interim Peace.

[7] After World War II and a renewed inflationary episode until the early 1950s, the Bank of Finland managed the country's regime of financial repression, then liberalization in the 1980s.