Visa wants to make the process of paying for goods on your phone or iPad as easy as swiping your credit or debit card at an offline retailer.

To do so, it's adapting to Internet retail with the launch of Visa Checkout, a new payment option that will allow users to speed through the online checkout process in just a few steps.

Visa is introducing a username and password system for making payments, which would eliminate the need to enter a 16-digit credit card number.

“Merchants want to sell, they want to convert cardholders to sales,” said Sam Shrauger, Visa's senior vice president of digital solutions, at an event announcing the launch. “People want to buy, people want to enjoy what they're buying. What they don't want to spend their time doing is paying.”

Visa isn't the first to do this, of course. PayPal has offered a similar payment option for years, and more recently Amazon launched a competing payment button.

But Visa was careful to make it sound like it wasn't competing with PayPal for these payments. CEO Charles Scharf called PayPal an “important partner” to Visa because many PayPal transactions are also paid for on Visa cards.

“We like those transactions,” he said. “But we shouldn't have to rely on anyone else.”