Five Questions With Austin Diaz, Co-Founder of LastPay

Austin Diaz co-founded LastPay with Max Umlas to give small businesses a payment processor they can read. Diaz started in payments as a teenager, watched the industry up close, and decided the only way to fix it was to build something honest. Umlas brought the operational backbone, scaling the company’s client acquisition engine and backend systems. We asked Diaz five questions.

Q. What does LastPay do, in one sentence?

We help businesses get paid faster, keep more of every transaction, > and stay inside the accounting tools they already use.

Q. The processing industry has been around for decades. What gap did you see?

The gap was simple. Owners cannot read their statements. The pricing > is built that way on purpose. I grew up around that, and it never made > sense to me. We started LastPay so the answer to ‘what am I paying’ > is one number, on one line, with no asterisks.

Q. You are younger than most founders in fintech. Has that helped or hurt?

Both, at different times. Some prospects assumed I was the assistant > on the first call. The way past that was results. We brought a > side-by-side audit, showed the savings, and let the numbers run the > conversation. Once the first wave of customers vouched for us, the age > question stopped coming up.

Q. What is the most common mistake you see businesses make with their processor?

Treating it as a sunk cost. Owners spend hours optimizing their > inventory and minutes thinking about their merchant statement. The > math is upside down. A fifty basis point difference on a million in > volume is five thousand a year, every year, until you fix it.

Q. What is next for LastPay?

More integrations, more audits, and more owners who stop overpaying. > My co-founder Max Umlas has been building the operational engine > behind the scenes, scaling how we onboard customers, structuring the > backend, and making sure the growth holds. The next year is about > taking the playbook that worked in QuickBooks and running it across > Sage, NetSuite, Xero, and Go High Level.

Q. Who is the customer that benefits the most from LastPay today?

Service businesses with five hundred thousand to five million in > annual card volume that send invoices through QuickBooks. Plumbers, > electricians, contractors, agencies, B2B subscription operators. The > bigger the gap between the headline rate they were quoted and the > effective rate they are paying, the bigger the savings tend to be.

Q. What feature do you wish customers asked about more often?

Settlement timing. Owners obsess over rate, and rate is important. The > hidden lever is when the money lands. A two-day improvement in funding > time on six figures of monthly volume is real working capital. Most > owners have stopped expecting their processor to compete on this. They > should start.

Q. What is the most important thing a small business owner can do this week?

Pull your last three processing statements. Add the fees. Divide by > your volume. Read the number. If it is over three percent on a > standard card mix, send the statements to two vendors and ask for a > like-for-like quote. The whole exercise takes an hour. The savings, if > they are there, fund the next hire.

Q. What separates the customers who switch processors from the ones who keep paying too much?

Time. The owners who switch tend to have ten free minutes on a Friday > and a bookkeeper who flagged a statement line. The owners who do not > switch are the ones running on no free minutes. We built the audit to > take less than ten minutes. The customer sends a statement. We send a > side-by-side. The whole exchange happens over email. We took the > friction out of the comparison so the time problem stops protecting > the legacy vendor. > > Integrations. QuickBooks is live. Sage, NetSuite, Xero, and Go High > Level are in development. The thesis has not changed. A business > should not have to change its accounting tool to get a better deal on > payments. The payments product should fit the business, not the other > way around.

For a closer look at the platform, watch Sending Invoices On QuickBooks With LastPay on the LastPay YouTube channel.