Change the World
The Top Ten
PayPal Holdings
+6 spotsFinancial Data Services
Like so many other business leaders last winter, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman didn’t believe Vladimir Putin would actually send Russian forces into Ukraine. “I thought for sure there would be politics that would intervene,” Schulman recently told Fortune. So when infantry and tanks barreled across the border toward Kyiv on Feb. 24, Schulman and his team faced a distressing surprise, and a flood of tough tasks. Job one was making sure employees and customers’ balances were safe on both sides of the border. (Russia and Ukraine together accounted for about half of 1% of PayPal’s revenue in 2021.) The company quickly shut down its Russia operations. But far more urgent was the challenge of extending a lifeline to the swelling numbers of Ukrainians displaced by the war. Refugees would need humanitarian aid; and both those who left and those who stayed would need to access money even as their banks were shuttered, hacked, or destroyed. PayPal and its partners would have to quickly vet a swath of pop-up Ukraine-focused charities; verify the identities of those who said they were displaced; and put fraud protections in place for users who were now hundreds or thousands of miles from their homes. Experience and global reach made those tasks less daunting. PayPal has long-standing relationships with central banks and regulators worldwide, including in Ukraine. Its donation platform, PayPal Giving, had already been used by some 400 million customers and merchants before the war broke out. Under normal circumstances, building a person-to-person payment network that could reach hundreds of thousands of people would take nine months to a year; PayPal had one up and running in Ukraine in nine days. “I told the team, like, let’s move mountains,” Schulman recalls. PayPal has certainly moved an enormous amount of much needed money. Through late September, its customers used the platform to raise more than $600 million for relief efforts in Ukraine. PayPal has also helped Ukrainian citizens receive and send another $330 million in person-to-person payments and money transfers. And it has tallied almost 300,000 new Ukrainian account sign-ups since the war began. Someday those may become paying customers, but that’s a question for a more peaceful day: PayPal is waiving all money transfer and remittance fees for Ukrainian accounts through Dec. 31.
Alibaba Group Holding
Internet Services and Retailing
When Shanghai cast its 25 million people into lockdown over COVID in April, residents had little time to stock up on essentials. But more notice wouldn’t have prepared them for what lay ahead: restrictions that trapped them in their homes for two months straight. The city government wasn’t ready for a lockdown of such magnitude either, and it struggled to get food and basic goods to residents. In the end, officials turned to China’s delivery giants—Alibaba, JD.com, and Meituan—to ferry items to a city in need. Alibaba’s food delivery platform Ele.me established special services for the elderly, the disabled, and families with young children. JD.com relocated 5,000 workers to Shanghai from other cities to meet demand that peaked at 1.5 million orders fulfilled per day. Meituan introduced a community buying feature that let neighbors order in bulk, ultimately delivering over 70 million items during the lockdown. For weeks the companies’ workers, zipping around on motorbikes, were among the only people on Shanghai’s vacant streets.
Walmart
General Merchandise
It’s an absurd and uniquely American scandal that an estimated 1.2 million of the nation’s diabetics struggle to afford the insulin they need each day to survive. A month’s supply of the medicine can cost an uninsured individual—or an insured individual who hasn’t met their deductible—more than $1,000; even with rebates, American consumers are likely to pay four times more for insulin than those in other countries, according to a 2018 RAND study. The U.S. government has repeatedly failed to rein in those prices, most recently this summer with the scuttling of a proposal that would have capped the price at $35 a month for many patients. Walmart’s answer to this was launching a private label insulin, ReliOn, in partnership with NovoNordisk. In 2021, the retailer introduced two kinds of analog insulin, i.e. the type used by most people with diabetes in the US, starting at $72/vial, a fraction of the cash price for branded products—a 58%–75% discount, according to the company. The more affordable insulin dovetails with the massive retailer’s ambitions to make health care more accessible; it says cash-paying customers have so far saved more than $15 million on their insulin with ReliOn’s new analog products.
Discovery
Insurance: Life and Health
Founded as a health insurer, Discovery has branched into banking, where it's incentivizing physical and financial health simultaneously. Its Vitality model offers lower loan interest or higher deposit rates to diligent savers—and also rewards them with discounts on wellness products and healthier food. Vitality has helped make Discovery’s banking unit one of the fastest-growing in South Africa.
Qualcomm
Semiconductors and Other Electronics
As cars grow more and more like iPads on wheels, Qualcomm’s tech has become central to making them cleaner and safer. Its Snapdragon Digital Chassis platform helps synchronize internal electronics to make combustion engines more fuel-efficient. In newer cars, Snapdragon coordinates the systems that underpin collision-avoidance systems—and will soon empower self-driving.
