The Australian Financial Review Business Person of the Year 2021: Afterpay duo’s digital innovation the biggest deal.

Afterpay has now changed ideas about consumer credit, cracked overseas markets, and made money for Australian investors faster than any other business, with the shares rising hundredfold since listing in 2016. It has spawned imitators as it has done so, creating a new type of global payment concept.

This year’s pair demonstrate how the pandemic has accelerated practical technological change.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey saw it, and bought it for his payments firm Block, in a scrip deal worth $39 billion when it was finalised in August. And Mr Eisen says such consumer fintech is still in its infancy.

Afterpay, Atlassian and Canva have turned Australia into a source of technology that can storm overseas markets.

Canva’s astonishing climb

That was massively confirmed this year when two capital raisings valued design software maker Canva, started by the now married Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, at an astonishing $55 billion. The founders of what has become Australia’s biggest ever start-up unicorn, already very active philanthropists, are also named in the Financial Review’s wider Business People of the Year list.

Digital innovators rise quickly from nowhere. Mike Henry, another of the Financial Review’s Business People of 2021, leads a company that’s been Australia’s most significant for much of our history. But BHP has lasted so long because of leaders that kept reinventing for new times.

From a silver and lead miner to Australia’s steel maker in two world wars, and on to global iron ore, coal and copper miner and oil and gas producer, Mr Henry is starting a third transformation. BHP’s petroleum to potash swap has moved climate change matters away from just sustainable operations and right into its core business.

Australia’s home-grown global banking giant Macquarie Group is doing the same. Under Shemara Wikramanayake, two-thirds of revenue come from overseas, and it is still investing in growth.

But it’s the expertise in renewables and in decarbonising infrastructure that stands out. While the Coalition has committed the nation to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, business and capital has been making the running on what is shaping as an economic transformation as great as the shift from a British-focused wool exporter back when the Financial Review began publishing in 1951.

Andrew Forrest, a high-profile presence at COP26 in Glasgow, has been Australia’s chief business stirrer on this, looking not just to make himself a hydrogen baron as well as an iron ore magnate, but with a strong streak of personal activism in it too.

Ian Silk, the remaining Business Person of the Year, represents the flip side of an ageing population: the rising power of Australia’s vast compulsory savings pool. He has run the biggest industry fund, AustralianSuper, or its predecessors since 1995, and union-backed super funds are now the biggest single shareholders in top ASX-listed companies.

And now they are reshaping capital markets by taking public assets private, too.

The Business People of the Year for 2020 were CBA’s Matt Comyn and Fortescue’s Elizabeth Gaines for the Team Australia approach to the pandemic. This year’s pair demonstrate how the pandemic has accelerated practical technological change.