Volt Bank, a fintech start-up that was granted a restricted banking licence in May, will need to have raised A$1.5 billion capital in eight years to become fully operational. It is confident it will generate at least one-third of this - that is, $100 million per year for five years - from its own retained earnings.In a presentation to the Fintech Agility Conference in Sydney yesterday, Luke Bunbury, Volt's co-founder and deputy CEO said Volt would need to raise the other $1 billion from investors - and all projections depend on the neobank gaining a full banking licence from APRA so it can open its doors to the general public."We expect to make about $500 million in retained earnings, so we need to raise about billion dollars in capital."Volt falls outside the remit of venture capitalists, is too small for private equity and, in the absence of a full banking licence, no insto or super fund has a mandate to invest.Bunbury and his team have nevertheless managed to work their way through several early stage funding rounds. He told Banking Day that seed funding and the first two funding series have mostly relied on the backing from high wealth individuals and family offices that understand the banking sector.He said Volt Bank was about to close its Series B fund raising, based on a valuation of $120 million in "post-money" - that is, a combination of money raised plus the valuation at which it is raised. "We have raised about $22 million in total from seed funding, Series A and Series B," he said.Volt will become a fully-fledged ADI "hopefully before the end of the year", assuming it can satisfy all of APRA's criteria.Once this happens, Volt's Series C funding would be "upwards from [the $22 million raised so far]" with Bunbury suggesting his team would be seeking to raise $35 million in additional funding. This confidence stems from his discussions with some institutional investors - such as pension funds - that have mandates allowing them to invest in a licenced bank, but not earlier; others instos require revenue to start flowing and a third group are limited by mandates to hold back until profits are being made.Bunbury said as Volt passes each of these stages, it will be tapping more instos and expanding its product mix.His ambition for Volt is to be able to offer a full retail and SME banking service. "When we are comfortable with the consumer side we will launch to [our] small and medium business base," he told the gathering of fintech professionals.Bunbury disclosed that Volt has 85 staff covering all the skills needed from web design to engineering. He also was keen to stress that Volt is not setting out to be a smaller version of a big bank but to create an entirely new banking model. And although the Volt Bank's branchless digital-only model is, on a superficial level at least, similar to that used by ING Direct, Bunbury said that Volt's ambition was