By: Samira Batalha, Head of Communications at PTX Group
There is a familiar way of telling the story of immigration and money. A worker leaves home, earns abroad, and sends dollars back. It is a story of sacrifice, and it is true. Darley Tomaz believes it misses the most important part. The Brazilian-born founder and CEO of PTX Group argues that immigrant entrepreneurs are building value in two economies at the same time, and that almost nobody measures the second one.
“We help immigrants build their empire in the United States with legal security, while making sure the fruits of that success develop their country of origin with fairness and speed,” Tomaz says of the philosophy behind his Everett, Washington group of companies.
His own path illustrates the model. After leading fraud prevention projects in Brazil’s financial sector, Tomaz immigrated and founded, in 2022, what would become PTX Insurance. The company grew to more than 2,000 clients across 15 states, most of them Latin American immigrants who own construction, cleaning, and home service businesses. The group later launched PTX Exchange, an international money transfer platform with active corridors to Brazil and Mexico. Tomaz describes it as the piece that closes the cycle between money earned in the United States and the families waiting on the other side.
The first half of the thesis happens on American soil. Research from organizations such as the American Immigration Council has consistently shown that immigrants start businesses at higher rates than the native-born population. These companies hire locally and pay taxes. They sign leases, buy equipment, and serve customers far beyond their own communities. Every properly insured contractor and every formalized cleaning company strengthens the local economy where it operates.
The second half happens thousands of miles away. Remittances to Latin America have become one of the region’s most stable sources of external income, exceeding foreign direct investment in many countries according to World Bank data. Unlike institutional capital, this money arrives directly in households. It pays for education and healthcare, finances housing construction, and increasingly provides the seed capital for small businesses run by relatives back home. A dollar earned by a contractor in Washington State can become building materials in Jalisco within days.
Infrastructure connects the two halves, and infrastructure has historically failed this population on both ends. In the United States, immigrant entrepreneurs deal with financial products designed for a different customer, written in dense technical English and sold by advisors who do not understand their businesses. On the transfer side, senders face costs and delays that erode what they worked to earn.
“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,” Tomaz says.
The friction he describes is concrete. The group’s history includes a client who nearly lost a municipal contract over an incomplete insurance requirement, a delayed transfer that almost missed a tuition deadline, and business owners who overpaid for years because nobody explained the alternatives in Portuguese or Spanish. Solving those problems one client at a time, Tomaz argues, compounds into a community that keeps more of what it earns and puts it to better use in both countries.
He frames the thesis as economics rather than politics. Whatever one’s view of immigration policy, millions of immigrant entrepreneurs already operate in the United States, already generate value and already send part of it home. The open question is how efficiently that value moves, and who builds the systems that move it.
His answer is that the builders should come from the community itself. “Our clients are our own story, repeated two thousand times,” he says. “When you have crossed the river yourself, you design a very different bridge.”
