Read First Character of Each Line in File

I need a better way to read the first character of each line in a file and check if it equals the special character ¤. This character tells me where there is a break in the reports. The file has over 500,000 lines. Currently, this is my code -

if [[ $(echo $line|cut -c1-1) = "¤" ]]

I am using Korn Shell as a scripting language. Is there a better way to do this?

Thank you for your assistance.