Five payments providers in Europe and Asia are set to use Ripple's xVia technology, the distributed ledger startup announced Thursday.

The company's new customers include U.K.-based firms FairFX, RationalFX and Exchange4Free, in addition to peer-to-peer currency exchange platform MoneyMatch in Malaysia and settlements company UniPay from the Republic of Georgia.

Using Ripple's xVia tech will help these companies expand their customer base, said Ripple senior vice president of product Asheesh Birla.

"All of these customers run into the same problem: building bespoke connections to banks and networks all over the world. It's expensive and time consuming," he said in a statement. "xVia enables them to grow their overall market share by reaching new customers in new markets, easier than ever before."

Ripple explained in a blog post that, unlike traditional means of transferring funds abroad, such as wire transfers, xVia's standard API solution means that it doesn't suffer from high failure rates and manual reconciliation costs.

FairFX's chief commercial officer, James Hickman, said xVia "will allow us to reach more people, more efficiently and at a lower cost."

"It will also enable us to deliver on our commitment to give customers the most transparent, efficient and truly global money transfer possible using RippleNet," he said.

Ripple has been steadily acquiring new customers, and announced in February that fintech firms Beetech and Zip Remit also planned to adopt xVia.

Water ripples image via Shutterstock