Mobile payments and Elon Musk are among several trends and innovators poised for a breakout year in 2015, according to one expert.

In an interview on CNBC, Walter Isaacson, author of the best-selling Steve Jobs biography, predicts people who are "unbanked" in society will soon be able to make Internet purchases more easily. Isaacson, chief executive of the Aspen Institute, said the lack of banking options available to some will prompt electronic payment systems to rise to the challenge.

"It takes four days to move money sometimes if it's just an average person [trying] to use things like checks and credit cards that have transaction costs," Isaacson said. Those inefficiencies will spur the continued rise of mobile payments and digital currencies, which will eventually disrupt the banking sector.

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An estimated 68 million U.S. citizens—and some 2.5 billion across the world—operate without access to a bank. Analysts say this market is ripe for the increasingly hot mobile payments sector. A recent study by the Federal Reserve found that many unbanked consumers are already using smartphones to process financial transactions.

"I'm looking for different ways that people will be able to just transfer money pretty quickly," Isaacson said.

Isaacson also sees growth in some forms of cybercurrency "building on the … bitcoin phase we had a few years ago." And the disruption to financial services won't just be limited to the U.S., he said.

"Globally, once you open up the market to the next billion people coming on line who can make cellphone text payments and that sort of thing, I think it changes the economy quite radically," Isaacson said