By: Samira Batalha, Head of Communications at PTX Group
Before Darley Tomaz ever sold an insurance policy in the United States, he spent years on the other side of the financial system, hunting the people who abuse it. As a fraud prevention specialist in Brazil, he led projects that protected institutions and consumers from schemes draining billions from the economy. The routine often passed twelve hours a day. It also gave him something most founders never get: an insider’s view of how financial systems fail the people who depend on them most.
That experience now shapes a growing financial services company serving immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States. Tomaz is the founder and CEO of PTX Group, based in Everett, Washington. The group spans commercial insurance, business consulting and, most recently, international money transfers through its newest division, PTX Exchange. More than 2,000 active clients across 15 states rely on its services, most of them Latin American immigrants who own construction, cleaning, transportation and home service companies.
The origin story is unusual. In 2022, during his honeymoon in the United States, Tomaz ran a calculation that changed his career. “During our honeymoon in the U.S., I looked at the data clearly. The American financial sector alone represented two and a half times Brazil’s entire GDP,” he recalled. “If we were going to work that hard, we decided to do it in the most competitive market in the world.”
Market size was only part of the decision. Tomaz has described a growing conflict between his professional ethics and a system where, in his words, there was real interest in maintaining the very problems he had been hired to solve. He chose to start over in a new country and a new industry, working in a language he was still learning.
What he found when he arrived was a gap that statistics rarely capture. Millions of immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States operate formally. They pay taxes, hire employees and sign contracts. The financial system around them, however, was never designed with them in mind. Insurance requirements arrive in dense technical English. Banking relationships assume a long domestic credit history. And when the time comes to send part of their earnings to family in Brazil or Mexico, the available tools are often expensive and hard to compare.
Tomaz’s response was to build what he calls a financial home for this community. His companies hire people who lived the immigrant experience themselves and serve clients in their own language, with products structured around the actual lifecycle of an immigrant-owned business. PTX Insurance, the group’s first pillar, grew from a single office in Everett to a licensed operation in 15 states. PTX Exchange extends the same philosophy to cross-border money transfers, with active corridors serving Brazil and Mexico.
His years in fraud prevention still show in how the group operates. Immigrant-led financial companies carry a double burden of proof, Tomaz argues, because many clients arrive skeptical after bad experiences elsewhere. “We are building a structure to reduce friction and expand the growth possibilities of a community that has already proven its capacity to create value,” he has said.
The lesson he draws goes beyond his own companies. Immigrant entrepreneurs, in his view, redesign business models around problems they have personally lived. A founder who once waited days for a transfer to reach a parent abroad builds a transfer service with that memory in mind. One who lost an opportunity over a misunderstood coverage requirement trains an insurance team to pick up the phone on a Saturday.
He believes this is why the next generation of financial services for immigrant communities will increasingly be built by immigrants themselves. The market has started to notice. PTX Group recently ranked among the top independent agencies in a major national insurance carrier’s network, a sign that community-focused companies can compete on performance and win.
For Tomaz, the ranking matters less than the mission, which has not changed since that honeymoon calculation: help immigrants build their businesses safely in the United States, and make sure the results of that work reach the families who made the journey possible in the first place.
