American Express is different from Europay and Visa in that acquiring banks do not have any role in settling financial disputes along the clearing chain: American Express resolve these in direct contact with their members, called American Express Service Establishments, i.e., merchants. The role of the acquiring bank is effectively restricted to that of a forwarding agent for clearing messages that need to be sent from merchants to American Express.

Therefore, the only kind of exception that the bank is likely to have is that an outgoing clearing file that they have sent previously will be rejected, partly or in full, by American Express, perhaps because of a technical error, e.g., wrong merchant number or an incorrect total for the merchant's transactions, etc. The only action available to the bank would be to review the transactions within the file in question, find and fix errors, then reassemble the file and resend it to American Express. This is exactly what SmartVista Disputes and Exceptions module allows doing.