Modern financial development in Korea started with the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1876 and the subsequent entry into the country of joint-stock Japanese banks, which themselves had only been established in the course of that same decade.

[3] On 30 January 1899,[7] the Daehan Cheon-il Bank was created by merchants of Hanseong (now Seoul) with ostensible backing by the Joseon government, which two years before had proclaimed the Korean Empire.

[3] Ownership of the bank was reserved for a narrow elite, with the total number of shareholders growing to only 24 in 1901 and 38 at end-1902.

[6] The bank's first president was Joseon senior official Min Byeong-seok [ko], who in 1902 was succeeded by Prince Imperial Yeong, himself succeeded by Kim Gi-yeong (김기영), one of the bank's merchant founders,[6] in 1906, and by Lee Bong-rae in 1909.

[6] In 1909, the Daehan Cheon-il Bank moved its head office to the street level of the newly erected Gwangtonggwan building, which had just been erected by the Takjibu (financial department) of the Korean imperial government on the thoroughfare later known as Namdaemunno in central Seoul.

It was listed on the Korea Exchange in 1956,[9] nationalized by the military government in the early 1960s (by expropriating large shareholders on the premise that their wealth had been amassed illicitly),[10]: 43  and privatized in 1972, ahead of other Korean commercial banks that were only privatized in the early 1980s.