Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Fintech startup looks to expedite tax-free shopping online for First Nations
Globe and Mail | | July 29, 2018
Richard Cochrane thinks he has the solution for a problem that has plagued First Nations online shoppers since the start of the digital age.
That solution is his fintech startup, Status Exempt. The 29-year-old entrepreneur has developed a service and plugin for Shopify Inc.’s e-commerce platform that allows First Nations people to shop online without being charged the harmonized sales tax (HST), provincial sales tax or goods-and-services tax.
First Nations people who buy items online and have them shipped to a reserve are exempt from these taxes on purchases. But Mr. Cochrane says most retailers do not have an online process that takes the taxes off immediately. First Nations shoppers must submit their receipts to a provincial ministry of finance or the Canada Revenue Agency to get a refund, which Mr. Cochrane says can take up to 90 days to arrive.
“I’m thinking about 500,000 First Nations live in rural areas,” Mr. Cochrane says. “They don’t have access to Canadian Tire or Walmart. Almost their entire wallet will be spent online or through catalogues. This is one of the few interactions outside their reserve, and this is how they are experiencing it. I knew I had to build something a lot better.”
His business idea was born out of personal experience. Mr. Cochrane is a member of Curve Lake First Nation, north of Peterborough, Ont. In 2016, he was bedridden after knee surgery, got bored and decided to shop online. He says very few stores had a process to refund the HST.
“The stores that did have processes had poor ones. It took them at least a week to process the transaction for me,” he said. “I realized then what First Nations people in this country have to deal with daily shopping online.”
Status Exempt is intended to expedite that process . First Nations shoppers register online. Their Indian status cards and addresses are checked, and then they get login credentials. When they shop, retailers that offer the service will take the tax off immediately.
See: ‘No Coffee for Bitcoin’ Starbucks Clarifies as Media Misinterprets Its New Crypto Venture
The service is free for First Nations people who register, and Mr. Cochrane says it takes about five minutes to validate the status card and address. Status Exempt will get its revenue from fees of 3 per cent to 5 per cent that retailers will pay for every purchase made online via the app.
For the roll-out, retailers need to be on the Shopify platform to add the plugin to their sites. However, Mr. Cochrane is working on plugins for other e-commerce platforms, such as Magento and WooCommerce. He’s willing to build a custom plugin for major retailers not on an e-commerce platform.
Canada has more than 970,000 First Nations people, and the number is growing, and it’s a young population. The 2016 census found that one-third of First Nations were 14 and under – a group raised with digital devices and who are comfortable shopping online. Of the First Nations people with registered or treaty Indian status, 42 per cent live on reserves, according to the 2016 census.
Mr. Cochrane thinks his startup could open a sizeable market. “This is a huge opportunity for online merchants to increase their sales overnight by providing this service,” he said. “Online stores are missing out on a huge percentage of the Canadian population that is hesitant to shop online because the experience isn’t up to par compared to the bricks-and-mortar experience.”
Tom Phillips, an economist with Trent University’s School of Business in Peterborough, says Mr. Cochrane has an innovative idea, but his primary challenge will be getting widespread adoption from First Nations and retailers.
“There are lots of apps that have great application and make a lot of sense, but have a roadblock in terms of adoption,” Mr. Phillips said. “You’ve got to spend some money exposing the market to the benefits. Users have to have knowledge of it.”
He says Mr. Cochrane will need money to expose Status Exempt to shoppers and businesses, and he will also need to use his networks in the aboriginal and entrepreneur community to help market it.
See: How To Start a Startup: 10 Steps to Launch
Mr. Cochrane has been funding the development of Status Exempt with his personal savings and about $30,000 in grant funding.
The University of Windsor graduate worked in Toronto with the Bank of Montreal’s aboriginal banking unit as well as at HSBC Global Banking and Markets before deciding to launch Status Exempt in 2017. He has used the funding to hire professional developers to build his plugin and is targeting Sept. 1 as the date for it to go live.
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August 26, 2026 | NCFA Market Activity | Capital Markets And Market Infrastructure, Regulation And Policy, Risk Compliance And Regtech When Creators Can Influence The Market Outcome On August 19, 2026, CRSHMARKET promoted a wider vision for its livestream prediction market, where people can put money on events while a stream is still unfolding. Its campaign showed markets around dates, public interactions and creator content, while the live product currently remains concentrated in video games such as Rocket League and Among Us. The format is built around speed. Users enter dollar amounts on short yes-or-no outcomes and some markets can settle within minutes. When checked on August 26, CRSHMARKET on-chain volume showed about US$7.79 million in cumulative USDC entry volume across current and earlier contracts. DefiLlama says each entry is counted once and treasury seed liquidity is excluded. What happens if the product expands beyond esports into creator-led livestreams where the person on screen can affect what traders are betting on? Creator Markets Need Different Controls Prediction markets already have to manage insider information. Creator-led markets add another problem because someone close to the content may be able to influence the result itself. A market on whether a streamer gets ...
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Aug 25, 2026 A seed-stage fintech doesn't have the compliance headcount of a bank, but it runs into the same onboarding failure modes on day one. Pick the wrong KYC vendor at this stage and you're locked into a twelve-month contract sized for volume you won't hit until Series B — while real users bounce off a verification flow that takes four minutes and rejects one in five of them. The Contract Problem Nobody Mentions on the Sales Call Most enterprise KYC platforms are priced for banks — five-figure monthly minimums, annual commitments, a sales cycle built around a company that already knows its verification volume two years out. A startup running 400 verifications a month signs the same contract structure as a bank running 400,000. Same paperwork. Wildly different math. That mismatch shows up first on the invoice, then in the engineering hours nobody budgeted for. Pay-per-approved pricing solves half of the problem. The other half is speed to first verification — how long it takes from signed contract to a live SDK in production. A startup's runway doesn't stretch to a six-week integration project, no matter how good the false-rejection rate looks in the sales deck. There's a ...
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