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Banco del Pichincha was founded in Quito in 1906, making this among the earliest notes it ever issued. Waterlow & Sons supplied the printing, as they did for dozens of Latin American institutions during this period — the bank had little choice but to contract abroad, since no Ecuadorian facility could produce security-printed currency of acceptable quality at the time.

Ecuador's banking system in 1907 was fragmented, with several private banks holding note-issuing privileges simultaneously. The Pichincha's early notes competed directly with those of the Banco Comercial y Agrícola de Guayaquil, an institution that would later become notorious for its role in Ecuador's catastrophic monetary crisis of the 1920s.