Archa, founded by Toorak IT entrepreneur Oliver Kidd, is one more neo-bank in search of a licence from APRA and its plans for its first weeks and months are like many other banks around the globe, including one early mover in Australia, Xinja.Coming out from under the radar unifies the disruptive plans of these so far mostly imaginary banks.Kidd, Archa's founder and principal, was previously chief operating officer of the ASX-listed Omni Market Tide, a digital shareholder engagement company. He has spent most of the last year overseeing the development of a banking platform from a leafy quarter of Toorak.He hired a team of software developers to build a platform that is expected to come to market in August.Kidd, a 27 year old lawyer who hails originally from Queensland, says his long-term ambition is to roll out a full-service banking offer to consumers."We're preparing to position ourselves as a challenger bank marketing an offer  of proprietary products through a mobile digital medium," he said.Archa received a boost in the last month after investors in Australia and the UK stumped up a fresh line of capital to progress the business.One of Kidd's new shareholders is Oxford associate professor of accounting, Amir Amel-Zadeh, who before his academic appointment worked in the fixed income group at Lehman Brothers in London.Kidd is now in talks with several credit unions that he declined to name, to partner in the first stage of the company's pre-paid product roll out.It appears that Archa is following a development path akin to UK neo-banks, Monzo and Revolut, by rolling out a prepaid debit card as its first product."Ultimately, we want to be a challenger bank marketing an offer for proprietary products through a mobile digital medium," Kidd said."We have not yet applied for a banking licence but are now working with third parties to distribute a debit card from August followed by a consumer finance product."The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority should expect a wave of licence applications from digital banking aspirants like Kidd's Archa vehicle over the next 12 months as software development companies move aggressively to market their newfangled wares. Leading software developers such as Temenos and Misys are driving expectations among industry aspirants that their platforms can generate cost savings that the legacy systems of the four major banks would struggle to match.This is a recurring theme of the business cases that local digital start-ups are advancing in their campaigns to raise capital from local and overseas investors.Despite most of the media hype around these so-called neo-banks, not a lot is really known about Australian innovators working on business cases for new digital banks.We seem to know more about fintech start-ups that are targeting the less capital intensive and more easily got revenue from niches of the payments system.Xinja founder and chief executive Eric Wilson said his company was "in deep conversations" with APRA on progressing its application for a restricted banking licence.Xinja is already marketing a prepaid debit card to Australian customers and is preparing to launch