Banking News

Breaking Down the Race for the #1 Business Bank Mantle

(21 June 2024 – Australia) While competition for deposits and loans has intensified ever since CBA signalled its intent to unseat NAB as the largest business bank in 2020, what impact has this altered dynamic had on the market at large?

Digging deeper into APRA’s Monthly Banking Statistics, East & Partners long running Deposit Funding & Debt Index provides a granular breakdown of deposit and lending growth by segment, revealing insightful disparities between small businesses and large corporates credit appetite and deposit growth.

How successful has CBA been in winning NAB customers away from its small business heartland? Where is ANZ and Westpac achieving outstanding growth? Overlaying East’s demand side segmentation allows unique inferences to be derived by bank and segment, including business to retail deposit volume ratios, deposit and lending market share, rate triggers for deposit switching, deposit churn levels and term deposit tenors.

“Beyond Judo’s rapid ascent as the only meaningful challenger bank in the market, international banks continue to face difficulty prising sticky deposits away from the incumbent Big Four majors. In what is a distinctly two-speed economy exhibiting pockets of extreme revenue growth weakness and rising insolvency risk against record high growth sector verticals, client ID has never been more important as a heightened focus on credit quality prevails” commented East & Partners Head of Markets Analysis, Martin Smith.

“In terms of business banking consolidation, is ANZ’s acquisition of Suncorp a portent of things to come or will we see a continued period of M&A stasis? Are international banks successfully expanding their reach beyond the top end of town into the ultra-competitive middle market?”