Austin Diaz co-founded LastPay with Max Umlas because they watched the same scene play out a few hundred times. A small business owner opens a processing statement, squints at the assessments and interchange line items, and asks the simple question nobody in the industry has been able to answer in plain English: where is my money going.
Diaz had a head start on that question. He entered the payment processing industry in his teens, before most founders have written their first line of code. By the time he reached college age, he had spent years inside an industry built on opacity. He saw the markups buried in tier pricing. He saw the software that crashed on Friday afternoons. He saw the contracts written to outlast the businesses that signed them.
He and co-founder Max Umlas built LastPay to do the opposite of all of that. Diaz led the payments and product side. Umlas shaped the operational and growth strategy, scaling client acquisition and building the backend systems that turned a service-first idea into a company that could compound.
The company sits at a familiar intersection. Owners send invoices. Owners want to get paid. Owners do not want to lose five percent of every dollar to a processing structure they cannot read. LastPay routes payments at lower cost, syncs the result into QuickBooks, and stays out of the way of the workflow the business already runs. The pitch is short. The proof is on the processing statement.
Clients have reported savings in the thousands per month. A handful clear into high five figures over the course of a year. The pattern is consistent enough that LastPay rarely needs to oversell. A side-by-side comparison of the old statement and the new one closes most deals.
Diaz is candid about the harder part of building in fintech as a young founder. Trust is the moat in this industry, and trust is what young founders have least of. He tells the story of early calls where prospects assumed he was the assistant. He kept showing up with the same answer to that problem, which was results. He would propose a side-by-side audit. He would show the numbers. He would stop talking and let the math finish the sentence.
Word of mouth did the rest. A contractor would mention it to another contractor. An accountant would loop in two clients. The brand grew the slow way, which is the only way a payments brand grows.
The roadmap looks the way it should. QuickBooks lives today. Sage, NetSuite, Xero, and Go High Level are next. The thesis is that no business should change its accounting stack to save on processing. The processor should fit the stack instead.
What stands out about LastPay is not the integration list. It is the fact that the company refuses to dress up a fundamentally simple product. Take less of every transaction. Move money on time. Sit inside the tools the customer already uses. That is the whole offer. Diaz is betting that small business owners have been waiting a long time for someone to lead with that.
The audit-led model has a quiet side benefit. It self-selects for the customers a young company should want. Owners who are willing to pull a statement and read the math are the same owners who pay invoices on time, who renew without drama, and who refer their peers without being asked. Diaz has spent the year building the company to those customers and not the other ones.
What the company is not doing is a useful tell. There is no celebrity ambassador. There is no app store of bolt-on features. There is no roadmap deck that runs four quarters into the future and never lands. The company is shipping integrations its customers asked for and writing statements its customers can read.
He may be right. The processing industry has spent two decades making its product harder to read. LastPay is making its product easier.
For a closer look at the platform, watch Introducing LastPay on the LastPay YouTube channel.
