Corporate bankers have reported greater interest among business clients to move their supply chains closer to where their consumers are located. Clients are interested in both “onshoring,” which involves returning previously offshored activities to the business’ home country, as well as “near-shoring,” which moves those activities to nearby countries.

Why should we care?
According to Daniel Son, Head of the Global Banking Division at U.S. Bancorp, onshoring won’t happen overnight, just like offshoring took years and decades to reach the point it’s at now. But, if a reverse flow happens in full force due to greater supply-chain and geopolitical volatility, then this may have major effects on proptechs as well as global payments platforms. According to the commercial real estate firm CBRE, onshoring and nearshoring firms are driving a “huge uptick” in demand to build manufacturing plants in North America. Proptechs have an opportunity reduce fixed costs for those firms, making nearshoring and onshoring a more attractive prospect. Meanwhile, global payments platforms may soon see cross-border financial flows decrease or change directions (e.g. to production facilities in Haiti instead of China), forcing these platforms to reallocate support and compliance resources for regions with relatively less commercial demand at present.