Mastercard has selected Australia, along with the US and the UK, for the initial rollout of its new payment offering, Mastercard Installments – a buy now pay later program for online and instore payments.

It first local partners are Latitude Financial Services and Qantas Loyalty. Overseas it is working with Barclays, Fifth Third, FIS, Galileo, Huntington, SoFi and Synchrony.

It reckons its competitive advantage in an increasingly crowded market is that it can use its payment network to streamline integration between financial service companies and merchant infrastructure.

“Mastercard Installments is embedded in the core Mastercard network,” the company said in its media release.

Mastercard’s focus is on enabling digital payments – pre-approved through a banking app, digital wallet or directly on a merchant website.

It is promoting the product as “an additional choice to debit, credit or prepaid cards.”

Mastercard did not provide any details about merchant fees or interchange rates but its focus on “additional choices” has already prompted some commentators to suggest that part of the strategy is about converting what would usually be debit transactions into “credit transactions”, which attract higher interchange.

It will make use of open banking, using account-level transaction histories as part of the credit decision process.

Mastercard said a point of difference from other BNPL providers is its zero-liability fraud protection.