Born in 1838 as the eldest son of Yasuda Zen'etsu, a low-ranking samurai of Toyama in Etchu Province. At seventeen he went to Edo in service, and after stints as a money-changer's and dried-bonito-dealer's apprentice, set up his own money-changing business 'Yasudaya' in 1864. Around the Boshin War he amassed enormous wealth from arbitrage in Dajokan bills, the new fiat currency. In 1876 he established the Third National Bank; in 1880 he founded the Yasuda Bank, the nucleus of what became today's Mizuho, and built the Yasuda zaibatsu with finance as its core. Expanding into casualty and life insurance, railways, electric power, and mining, it took its place as one of the four great zaibatsu alongside Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and Sumitomo. He took frugality as his creed: 'Value a single mon and it becomes a ryo.' In 1920 he donated one million yen (worth roughly five billion yen today) to Tokyo Imperial University, funding the construction of the Yasuda Auditorium. On September 28, 1921, at his villa 'Jurakuan' in Oiso, he was stabbed to death by the ultranationalist Asahi Heigo with a short sword. He was 84.

A thoroughgoing skinflint, to the point of being jeered as a 'miser.' He contented himself with rough clothing and simple food while lavishing private means on public works and donations. In business he preferred steady transactions and avoided speculation. He had a phenomenal head for numbers and memory, and is said to have recited his counterparties' ledgers from memory. Throughout his life he never placed newspaper advertisements and kept his signboards modest; yet that very soundness produced absolute confidence in the Yasuda Bank.

The Yasuda Bank became Fuji Bank in 1948 and formed the core of the Mizuho Financial Group born in 2002. Sompo Japan in casualty insurance and Meiji Yasuda Life in life insurance also descend from the Yasuda line. The Yasuda Auditorium on the Hongo campus of the University of Tokyo became a symbolic piece of Japanese university architecture and was inscribed in history as the stage of the 1968–69 University of Tokyo struggles. His philosophy of thrift and solid management is regarded as a prototype of the distinctly Japanese style of financial management.