Earlier this week, the Australian Bankers Association let it be known that it has sent a completely rewritten Banking Code of Practice to ASIC for review.The ABA said the new draft was the result of "hundreds of hours of development and more than 50 meetings with banks and key stakeholders over the past nine months, dating back to when the final report from independent reviewer Mr Phil Khoury was received, with 99 suggested changes in policy, tone and content." According to the ABA, the banking industry has accepted 96 of the 99 recommendations "in some form", which, it asserted, "is proof that banks are serious about change…"The new code itself has not been published, so analysis has limited to comparing Phil Khoury's report with the hazy contents of a media release from the ABA chief executive Anna Bligh. And it was sent early to a few mainstream media outlets, a move that was presumably seen as necessary to garner favourable and more prominent coverage.From this uneven start, we learn that the banking industry has "voluntarily introduced a new simplified, customer focused code"."… the new code … has been completely rewritten to better meet community expectations and service the needs of customers," Bligh said."The new code has been broken into ten key parts, with four brand new sections including one dedicated to small businesses and another related to making banking more available for customers and easier to access."The remaining six sections represent a complete restructure of important parts of the current code, although no details have so far been provided.The ABA said "some of the changes that Australians can expect in the new code are more transparency around products and services, and a more prominent commitment to ethical behaviour."This use of the word commitment itself gives rise to one of the criticisms made by Khoury: the too easy misuse of a word or phrase, which ends up as management jargon or marketing speak. Nonetheless, even those who have been harsh critics of the way the banking sector treats its customers are now giving a mixed response.What's been included has largely been hinted at and lumped into a single paragraph, covering:•    a new deferred sales model for consumer credit insurance on credit cards, •    small business contracts written in plain English, •    the right to close a credit card account online; and•    notification to customers before their introductory credit card interest free period expires. According to the ABA, the banks will introduce ways to proactively identify customers who may be experiencing financial difficulty and implement better safety nets for guarantors."This new set of rules and behaviours will go a long way in addressing the expectations that Australians have of their banks," Bligh said.This is one area that can go negative very quickly. The Khoury report recommended banks develop processes to monitor behaviour by debt collectors towards their "debt assignees". The recommendation was "supported in part" by the ABA, but it was stated unequivocally that "the industry does not support requiring banks to