By: Samira Batalha, Head of Communications at PTX Group
On a Saturday that was supposed to be quiet, Darley Tomaz’s phone rang. A client was calling from Alaska, a contractor on the verge of losing a major renewal for a municipal fiber-optic network. The problem had nothing to do with the quality of his work. It was paperwork. The insurance adequacy required by the contract was incomplete, and the deadline was closing.
“Proper protection was the missing key to signing the contract,” Tomaz recalls. His team worked through the weekend to complete the coverage, and the client signed. The contract changed the trajectory of that business. Inside PTX Group, the financial services company Tomaz built for immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States, the episode became a founding story that gets retold to every new hire.
For Tomaz, the story carries a conviction that runs through everything his companies do. In financial services, the real product is trust: the confidence that when a client’s livelihood is on the line, someone competent will answer the phone. On a Saturday, if necessary.
The conviction has an unusual origin. Before immigrating from Brazil, Tomaz led fraud prevention projects in the country’s financial sector, work that showed him what happens when financial trust breaks down. Institutions rarely lose customers through one catastrophic failure. They lose them through accumulated small betrayals: a hidden cost here, an unreturned call there, fine print used against the people it was supposed to protect. When he founded what became PTX Group in Everett, Washington, in 2022, he essentially inverted his old job. Instead of catching those who exploit financial systems, he set out to build one that gave clients nothing to distrust.
The approach shows in the numbers. PTX Group serves more than 2,000 active clients across 15 states, mostly immigrant entrepreneurs in construction, cleaning and home services. Tomaz credits the growth to how trust behaves in tight-knit communities. A business owner who is well served tells other business owners. A reputation compounds faster than any advertising budget.
The same philosophy governs the group’s newest venture. PTX Exchange, the international money transfer platform launched with corridors to Brazil and Mexico, applies the Alaska standard to a different kind of urgent call, the one where a family member abroad needs money to arrive on time at a cost the sender fully understands. “The money our clients send home carries everything they came here to do,” Tomaz says. “Treating that transfer casually would betray the trust we built everything else on.”
Tomaz treats trust as an operational discipline rather than a sentiment. Inside his companies, that means service in the client’s language, total costs disclosed before any commitment, and a standing rule that urgent client problems outrank internal priorities, Saturdays included. He concedes none of it is glamorous. It is also very hard to fake over years, which is exactly why it works.
There is a larger argument in the Alaska story, one Tomaz returns to often. Immigrant entrepreneurs frequently lose opportunities for reasons that have nothing to do with skill or work ethic. A missing certificate. A misunderstood requirement. A delay nobody explained. Each point of friction is small on its own. Together, they decide who gets the contract and who watches it go to someone else. Removing that friction, client by client, is how a financial services company changes the trajectory of a community.
“The client in Alaska did everything right for years,” Tomaz says. “He just needed someone to make sure the system did not fail him at the last moment. That is the entire business, in one phone call.”
