Are Mobile Payments Bigger Business than Oculus Rift for Facebook?

It’s not hard to look at Facebook these days and wonder what on Earth it’s got in mind.

Not without reason, either; after all, Facebook has plenty going on, and its primary stock-in-trade, advertising revenue, could seemingly go south at any time. A recent report from Seeking Alpha suggests that the future of Facebook, meanwhile, may not lie with its recently acquired Oculus Rift virtual reality system, but rather with mobile payments, and Facebook should make some rather surprising moves accordingly.

The Seeking Alpha report notes that Facebook not only should focus on money transfer and mobile payments as a priority, but that Facebook should make a move that, recently, Google was rumored to be involved in. This is, specifically, pursuing Softcard as an acquisition target.

With Softcard under Facebook’s control, some believe, Facebook would be able to take its own massive user base and put said base to work buying and selling things through Facebook with the Softcard infrastructure.

It may sound strange to try and compare these two—it’s a very “apples and oranges” sort of setup, and surely Facebook can push just as hard on virtual reality as it could on mobile payments—but it’s an idea that makes its share of sense.

After all, Facebook has an impressive market capitalization, and at last report, the potential price Google was looking to pay for Softcard—a deal valued at under $100 million—was likely well within Facebook’s range as well.

Add on to this the fact that Softcard recently staged a round of layoffs to help “streamline processes” and it would suggest that Softcard’s current owners—AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile—may not have much of an interest in keeping the platform alive.

So maybe, just maybe, the trio is polishing up the chrome for a quick sale, so to speak, offering up a comparatively bargain basement price. This is where Facebook might be poised to get in.

A little over six months ago, Facebook welcomed former PayPal president David Marcus, a move that some believed heralded Facebook’s plans to get in on the mobile payments action.

It’s also somewhat lesser known that, according to reports, Facebook already has the capacity to launch a complete peer-to-peer money transfer / mobile payment system; the code in question need only be activated in order to launch it.

If Facebook made a play for Softcard, meanwhile, it might have the needed platform to connect to that code and make it a full-on mobile payments operation.

Given the projected size of the mobile payments market—which will likely prove higher than the virtual reality market, particularly in the short term—it’s likely that Facebook may be missing out on a key opportunity here by not acting.

But then again, it may be that Facebook has another plan altogether. We already know that mobile is a huge focus for Facebook these days, and so it may have another option set instead of shelling out for Softcard. Entirely possible, of course, but it’s still a point that must be considered.

Mobile payments is a major market, and a lot of competitors are already in play; for Facebook to show up late to this party represents some substantial potential losses, and these are losses Facebook can’t quietly abide. While it’s going to be some time before we see how all this bears out, the end result is the same: Facebook needs to invest and get in on some new opportunities, and mobile payments—backed up by Softcard’s infrastructure—could be just the ticket.