• The latest APRA figures show most banks are struggling to get customers to restart repayments.
• In August, just $10 billion worth of loans were thawed, leaving $229 billion frozen – including $160 billion in mortgages.
• It leaves around 230,000 loans withering, as Australians struggle to service their debts.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

If the latest figures are any indication, lenders have their work cut out for them convincing Australians to embrace their repayments.

While they’ve been hitting the phones for weeks, APRA data published on Wednesday shows progress is slow going. In the month of August, $24 billion worth of deferrals ended but another $14 billion was either approved or extended.

Put another way, the net result is that around 10,000 Australians actually exited the deferral program in sum, leaving $229 billion – $160 billion of it mortgages – frozen on the books. While it’s encouraging that the mountain is slowly being chipped away, it’s less progress than was made back in July.

It also suggests that Australian banks are facing an uphill battle in getting customers out of the hardship program as thousands of staff hit the phones throughout the month of September. More importantly, it indicates that there are still plenty of Australians who are struggling to make ends meet on some 230,000 loans.

With one in five customers not even picking up the phone, unemployment predicted to rise, and government support scheduled to fall, that’s unlikely to have changed much in the past four weeks.

In total, it’s 9% of all mortgages and 16.2% of all small and medium business loans that aren’t being paid. Many of those homeowners under pressure are concentrated in Queensland tourist destinations and on Melbourne’s fringes.

So far, the largest of Australia’s banks anticipate just $7 billion of loans will go bad. But it’s clear from APRA’s breakdown some are more than exposed than others. More than 10% of all Bank of Queensland, NAB, AMP, and ME Bank borrowers have deferred their repayments for example.

But some are making greater progress. NAB, the Commonwealth Bank, Bendigo Bank, and Bank of Queensland all managed to exit many more customers than entered their hardship program.

Overall, however, the outlook isn’t great. At the current rate, many of those will need be deferred into January, when there is no additional extension scheduled.

Without one, borrowers may have few alternatives but to bite the bullet and sell.

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