Jason Prescott keynotes nearshoring summit hosted by ProMexico

JP Communications CEO Jason Prescott opened the ProMexico nearshoring summit in Mexico City this week with a direct argument: the next decade of cross-border trade will be won not by tariff policy, but by the networks that make verified suppliers easy to find. Drawing on two decades of running B2B sourcing platforms, Prescott outlined how verified-supplier networks reduce friction in cross-border trade — and called for further harmonization of customs data.

The friction is information, not distance

Mexico's proximity to the United States is an advantage that gets squandered, Prescott argued, when a US buyer cannot quickly confirm that a Guadalajara or Monterrey supplier is real, capable, and compliant. The distance is short; the information distance is long.

Nearshoring is not a map exercise. A factory 200 miles away you cannot verify is further from your supply chain than one across the ocean that you can.

That framing puts verification — not geography — at the center of the nearshoring conversation. It is the same thesis behind JPC's Supplier Pass™ program, which Prescott cited as a working example of how a network can carry trust across a border faster than paperwork can.

Three asks for policymakers

Prescott's remarks closed with a short, practical agenda:

• Harmonize customs data so that a verified profile on one side of the border is legible to systems on the other.
• Standardize supplier identity so that capacity and compliance claims travel with the supplier, not the buyer.
• Lower the cost of trust for small and mid-size manufacturers, who are priced out of traditional audits but are exactly the suppliers nearshoring depends on.

Where JPC fits

For buyers acting on the nearshoring thesis now, JPC's custom sourcing desk and logistics support already operate across the US–Mexico corridor. The summit remarks were less a product pitch than a statement of where the company believes the next decade of global trade is heading — and why it has spent twenty years building the verification layer to meet it.