The main banks' muscle-up to the Macquarie challenge starts to show results for most of them. The rise of Bank Australia moves it out of the shadows too

The April APRA banking statistics are out and these reveal that interest rate competition is driving successful defensive responses to the Macquarie Bank challenge.

All the main banks won more than +$1 bln in additional customer deposits in April, with good comebacks by ANZ, Commbank and especially Westpac. NAB made minor gains as well, minor in comparison to its main rivals.

All the while, Macbank still managed good gains, just not market-leading this month.

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But some of the more interesting changes are showing up among the second-tier banks we follow.

(The third-tier banks, as a group, continue to be irrelevant on an industry basis, hardly growing over the past year.)

In April, both AMP Bank and HSBC lost  customer deposits, not unusual for these two institutions. In fact over the past year AMP Bank has seen its deposit base shrink by -$751 mln, and HSBC by -$1.12 bln. Even though it grew its customer deposits in April. Bank of Queensland has shed a massive -$1.58 bln over the past year, equivalent to a -4.6% decline. That is serious when you know that overall household deposits have expanded +8.1% in the same period.

Other second tier banks struggling to expand their deposit base include Great Southern Bank, Heritage Bank, Newcastle Permanent, and Teachers Mutual. Their struggles however contrast with others who are making some real progress.

The winners among second tier banks include Bank Australia (up +21% for the year, not including the effect of adding Qudos Bank or Australian Unity to their group), ING (+5.9%), Suncorp (+4.3% and now controlled by ANZ), and Bendigo Bank (+4.0%).

But none come anywhere near the Macbank growth of +35.6% in the year to April.