High-value financial transactions underwrite the need for a relying party to check the status of a digital certificate in real time. In this paper, we propose a simple mechanism for online certificate status chec- king that is particularly well suited to the closed public key infrastructures that characterize financial networks. We further demonstrate how persis- tent evidence of this status checking request/response becomes a valuable by-product. In financial systems, “transaction receipts” naturally accu- mulate and by doing so, they encapsulate the entire lifecycle of a single transaction.