By: Samira Batalha, Head of Communications at PTX Group
Every month, millions of workers in the United States send part of their income to family abroad. Most treat the transfer as a personal matter, a promise kept to the people back home. Darley Tomaz thinks that view is incomplete. The founder and CEO of PTX Group, a Washington State financial services company serving Latin American immigrant business owners, argues that remittances deserve the same attention an entrepreneur gives to payroll, insurance, or taxes.
“An immigrant entrepreneur who sends money home every month is running a recurring financial operation,” Tomaz explains. “When you treat it as an afterthought, you absorb costs and risks you would never accept in any other part of your business.”
World Bank data backs him up. Remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean have grown into one of the region’s most important sources of external income, larger than foreign direct investment in several countries. For an individual sender, these transfers often rank among the largest recurring expenses in the household budget, comparable to a car payment or a lease. Few people plan them that way. Fewer still review them once a year.
Tomaz immigrated from Brazil after leading fraud prevention projects in the country’s financial sector, and he sees this blind spot constantly among the more than 2,000 business owners his group serves across 15 states. A contractor will negotiate hard on a materials invoice, he notes, then send a five-figure annual sum abroad without comparing total costs or keeping any record of the transfers for accounting purposes.
His recommendation is to make remittances a formal category in the owner’s financial planning. In practice, that means three changes in behavior.
The first is measuring the real annual volume. Many senders think in individual transactions, a few hundred dollars here, a thousand there, and never add up the year. The total usually surprises them. Seeing the aggregate figure reframes the decision, because a sum that large deserves a deliberate strategy instead of a habit.
The second is looking at total cost instead of the advertised fee. The visible fee is one part of what a sender pays. The exchange rate applied to the transaction often matters more. When providers are compared on the amount that actually arrives on the other side, the ranking can change completely.
The third involves timing. Entrepreneurs with seasonal revenue, like landscapers, remodelers, and cleaning companies, can plan larger transfers during strong months instead of forcing a fixed amount during lean ones. The remittance enters the cash flow calendar next to estimated taxes and insurance renewals, where it belongs.
None of this diminishes the emotional weight of sending money home. Tomaz argues that planning honors it. “The money an entrepreneur sends to Brazil or Mexico is the most meaningful money that business will ever produce,” he says. “It builds a house for a mother. It pays a school bill in January. Something that important should not be managed casually.”
The perspective comes from his own path. Tomaz built PTX Group, which includes PTX Insurance and the international transfer platform PTX Exchange, around the full financial life of the immigrant entrepreneur: protect the business, grow it, and move the results of that work across borders with full transparency. The Exchange currently operates corridors to Brazil and Mexico.
He is careful with promises. No provider can guarantee savings in every situation, he notes, since exchange rates move and every sender’s needs differ. What entrepreneurs control is discipline. In his experience, the owners who thrive in the United States eliminate casual decisions from their finances one category at a time. For immigrant business owners, remittances are usually the largest category still running on autopilot.
“Formalizing your business changed your trajectory,” Tomaz says. “Formalizing how you send money home is the same discipline, applied to the money your family actually sees.”
