change the world

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Mapping the World Changers

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Fortune’s Change the World list is dedicated to the idea that the creative tools of capitalism—the perpetual quest for a better mousetrap, fueled by the profit motive—makes business uniquely suited to addressing society’s biggest challenges. The 2022 list, our eighth, comes as the world is continuing to move past the COVID-19 pandemic, but as other crises, among them climate change, war in Ukraine, gender and racial inequities, and lack of economic opportunity, loom just as large. This year’s list also features 18 smaller companies, with annual revenue under $1 billion, whose focus on public-interest problem-solving is having an outsize impact—including a <a href="https://fortune.com/company/zipline/change-the-world/">drone-delivery pioneer</a>, a <a href="https://fortune.com/company/karmsolar/change-the-world/">green-energy architect</a>, a <a href="https://fortune.com/company/alto-pharmacy/change-the-world/">pharmacy newcomer</a>, and <a href="https://fortune.com/company/infarm-aerofarms/change-the-world/">two fast-blossoming vertical-agriculture growers</a>. As always, our partner in selecting the honorees is <a href="https://www.sharedvalue.org/">Shared Value Initiative</a>, a consultancy that helps companies apply business skills to social problems. For more about this year’s list, <a href="https://fortune.com/2022/10/10/change-the-world-companies-startups-zipline-karmsolar-alto-pharmacy-infarm-aerofarms/">click here</a>.

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.

PayPal Holdings

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.

Alibaba Group

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.

Walmart

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.

Discovery

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.

Qualcomm

Eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica wants the world to clearly see the problem it’s been working to solve for the past decade. One in three individuals around the globe suffers from a condition that is, by 2022 standards, easily and cheaply fixable: poor vision, which may impair one’s ability to read, drive, or otherwise participate fully in society. The vast majority of them live in low-income countries where the resources to diagnose and treat the problem are scarce. 
 
To better serve these markets and tap into the down-the-road business opportunity, EssilorLuxottica deployed training programs and centers for rural vision care providers—it has trained more than 20,000 in low-income countries—and developed low-cost prescription glasses (sold for $5–$10). It has also developed inexpensive diagnostic tools, one of which costs less than $50, is portable, and can run without electricity, unlike the bulky machines likely to be found in a U.S. optometrist’s office. Those efforts, launched in 2013, now reach more than 10 million people every year. But the company, which recently founded the OneSight EssilorLuxottica Foundation to further scale the work, continues to think bigger: With the help of its partners, it successfully campaigned for vision care to be made one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in 2021, ensuring that from then on, the Vision for Everyone resolution, adopted by 193 member nations, would be measured and managed by leaders and decision-makers worldwide.

EssilorLuxottica

Latin America is notorious for a lack of financial access, especially among lower-income groups. Founder David Vélez wanted Nubank to be an “anti-bank,” eliminating barriers such as credit card fees and excessive paperwork. Today, it claims more than 70 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia; its once-neglected customer base delivered $1.7 billion in revenue to Nubank in 2021.

Nubank

Founded in 2016 by two former Tesla purchasing managers and financially backed early on by the EIB, the European Union’s development bank, Northvolt has grown to become its premier home-grown EV battery cell supplier. The company has raised close to $8 billion in equity and debt to finance its plans, while securing contracts worth roughly $55 billion from customers that include car brands BMW and Polestar as well as semitruck manufacturer Scania. Scania’s parent, Volkswagen Group, also owns a stake of approximately 22%, as does Goldman Sachs. 
 
To differentiate itself from lower-cost Asian competitors like China’s CATL or Japan’s Panasonic, Northvolt focuses more heavily on end-to-end sustainability in its manufacturing process, with an emphasis on renewable power and recycling of materials. Its first assembly plant, Northvolt Ett in Skellefteå, began commercial shipments this spring, and management has already signed deals to build two more factories, with a site in Germany due to open in 2025. Northvolt recently announced a different approach to greener batteries: The company said it plans to source renewable organic carbon for its EV cell anodes, using a plant-based polymer called lignin, derived from wood felled in sustainably managed Nordic forests.

Northvolt

Coal power has been a hard habit for companies to kick—especially in China, Japan, and Korea, where many have struggled to phase out the high-emissions fuel. In March 2021, AIA—Asia’s largest insurer, with revenue of $47.5 billion—announced that it would divest from all coal-related businesses by 2028. At the end of the year, it made a surprise announcement: It had sold its entire coal equity and fixed-income portfolio, seven years ahead of schedule, becoming the first major Asian insurer to make that crucial leap.

AIA Group

Shubham was started in 2011 by two consumer bankers who had tired of turning down people for loans simply because they couldn’t prove their income on paper. More than 60% of India’s population works in the informal sector and struggles to access formal financial services as a result. Shubham’s founders believed that such discrimination was unfair and misguided, and that these potential customers, most of whom had stable incomes, represented a huge unmet need. Today the firm provides customized home loans, tailoring a monthly credit program for each customer according to their situation; rather than using traditional document-based underwriting, Shubham personalized approach relies on interviews and other sources for income verification. To date, the company, which operates 113 branches across 10 states, has provided financing for more than 65,000 families. One of the fast-growing providers of affordable housing finance, Shubham has recently attracted the backing of investors like the Asian Development Bank and LeapFrog Investments to help it scale. Through August 2022, the company had a $332 million loan portfolio.

Shubham Housing Development Finance

The Top 10

Fortune's annual list dedicated to the idea that business is uniquely suited to address society’s biggest challenges.