Ripple, the San Francisco based blockchain company focused on improving global payments, has announced five new customers for its xVia product.

The new customers – FairFX (UK), Exchange4Free (UK), RationalFX (UK), UniPAY (Georgia) and MoneyMatch (Malaysia) – will use xVia to send payments over RippleNet (Ripple’s decentralized global network of banks, payment providers, digitial asset exchanges, and corporates).

xVia allows payment originators — those sending payments on a client’s behalf , but not responsible for actually processing the payment and paying it out to the recipient — to get access to RippleNet via a web services API (Application Programming Interface) without needing to install any software. Through this standard interface, they can send real-time trackable payments (with rich information, such as invoices, attached) globally. It significantly reduces their operating costs because there is only a single point of integration. In Ripple’s words, it allows “a variety of different players within the global payments ecosystem to interact and complete transactions directly — no longer requiring custom connections.”

According to Asheesh Birla, Senior Vice President of Product at Ripple, by tapping into RippleNet, these new customers will be able to “access new markets quicker and cost efficiently” because they would be able to avoid the problem of “building bespoke connections to banks and networks all over the world”, which is “expensive and time consuming”; using xVia, they can reach “new customers in new markets, easier than ever before.”

In addition to the benefits of lower operating costs, speed, and real-time payment status, payment originators using xVia to access RippleNet get one other important benefit: lower failure rates (since only one connection needs to be maintained) and thereby lower manual reconcilation costs.

One of these new customers, UK-based Exchange4Free, tweeted that it had joined Ripple’s global payment network because it was hoping for improved access to African markets: