Venture Lab invests capital in, and provides support to innovative fintech start-ups that increase access to, improve the quality of, or reduce the cost of financial services for the underserved at scale.

[5][6] Accion expanded its work to yet another country in April 2015 when it partnered with Myanmar's DAWN, a microfinance institution originally launched in 2002 as a program of Save the Children.

Since establishing an office in the country, Accion has partnered with local financial institutions in Patna and Mumbai, assisting them in applying individual and group lending and tailored credit scoring, among other microfinance methodologies.

CFI's work is grouped into three broad categories: Client Advocacy Examples of CFI's industry-wide initiatives include the Smart Campaign, the world's first global consumer protection campaign, and Financial Inclusion 2020, a movement that mobilized stakeholders around the globe to achieve full financial inclusion, using the year 2020 as a focal point for action.

Accion aimed to help those who didn't meet requirements for traditional financing (such as bank loans) because their requested amount was too small or because they had limited or damaged credit.

Accion now serves small businesses nationwide through four independent community development financial institutions (CDFIs) and a national office that invests in shared knowledge, innovation, and impact to benefit the entire network.

Additionally, Accion provides business advising and training services—both in person and through online educational resources—to tens of thousands of entrepreneurs each year.

By the early 1970s, Accion began to focus on addressing a major cause of poverty in Latin American cities: lack of economic opportunity.

An Accion organization in Recife called UNO coined the term "microenterprise" and began issuing small loans, pioneering the field of microcredit.

Blatchford's founding of Accion was heavily influenced by the philosophical works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Aldous Huxley and Mohandas Gandhi as well as The Ugly American by UC Berkeley professor Eugene Burdick and the classic essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” by William James.

Working from James’ main thesis, Blatchford believed that Americans needed to find new, non-militaristic ways to focus their involvement abroad while promoting self-determination and democracy.

The Accion workers did everything from digging ditches to building schools to fundraising to managing sensitive negotiations between opposing community leaders.

They realized they could do it and it changed their lives.”[25] By the mid-1960s, Accion was engaging fewer and fewer North Americans and Europeans and instead was hiring college-educated Venezuelans as organizers—a group called “Community Action Organizers.” Throughout the 1960s, Blatchford and other Accionistas worked with local business leaders in Argentina, Brazil (Rio, São Paulo, and Recife) and Peru to set up community development organizations that followed the same philosophy as the original Accion in Venezuela: “not to give people alms but to give them confidence in their own ability.” Many of these organizations, including Ação Comunitária do Brasil Rio de Janeiro, Ação Comunitária do Brasil São Paulo[permanent dead link‍] and Accion Comunitaria de Peru, which today is Mibanco – are still in existence today.