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The following post by Jerry Brady was originally published on the Accion Ambassadors Blog. Among Accion’s founders, Jerry Brady is currently working alongside Accion’s portfolio company, Vindhya, as part of Accion’s 2012 Ambassador Class. Vindhya – a company that provides data processing services – is eighty-percent staffed by “differently-abled” individuals. CFI is working specifically towards achieving full financial inclusion for differently-abled individuals through its Financial Inclusion for Persons with Disabilities project.

On the first floor of the Vindhya office in Bangalore, India, excitement is building on a Friday evening in October.  Soon we’ll learn who won the best employee awards for the third quarter.

I’ve staged many of such events myself, but this one buzzes with a higher energy because of who is gathering and the momentum Vindhya has gathered in the last quarter.

Staff has been at work all day, as usual, on 15 projects that demand a high degree of concentration, working side by side in tight quarters. Some have been digitizing documents into master files; some recording data, often translating from one of seven languages into English; others have been making or receiving phone calls. After a full day, you might expect them to be tired.  Doesn’t look like it.

To the outsider, the work done by the Vindhya staff may look like the classic, back-office work we’ve come to associate with India, and what one expects to be truly mind-numbing. But closer examination shows skill, judgment and experience are just as important as discipline. For example, one team has been calling people who have just signed up for the first pension they have ever known. ‘Are you in the right investment, are you keeping your money at work (and not withdrawing it for a wedding, for example), can we answer any questions for you?’ they ask, 900 times a day.

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