McLEAR RingPay

★★★★★ We’d bought his & hers Clear rings as Christmas present for each other but were struggling to get mine set up on Christmas day, as there was no activation code. I email support team at Clear to explain the situation and ask for help, and I didn’t think I would hear anything till after the Christmas Public holiday period was over. However, I was wrong, Chris at the support team, emailed back the same day and explained I needed the activation code to set up the ring, which would have been sent with the completion email. As it turned out the completion email had been sent to my wife’s email account, which she had then deleted, so I emailed back to Chris and ask him to resend the completion email. An hour or so later, Chris let me know that he’s resent the completion email to my wife’s email account, and I was then able set everything up. A few days later I had to contact the support team again as my wife had failed twice on the same day to make a contactless payment and Clare from the support team, email back and gave a list of reasons and things to try when making a payment, which proved to be very helpful, and helped resolve the issue. So, a big ‘thank you’ to the support team at Clear, not just for getting these rings up and running but also giving up their time on Christmas Day, thank you.

★★★★★ I see a number of people giving poor feedback for the app, but it's working well for me. Auto top up successful and push notifications arriving without issue. For those times when I am out for a run, but will be calling in for coffee the payment ring is ideal, and the app makes managing funds associated with it easy.

★★★★★ TL;DR; The hardware is amazing, but is let down by the software (both in the app and the service itself). Unfortunately, I struggle to find a useful place for this in my life. However, I continue to wear the ring and use it whenever it provides the chance to show off. ----- I've been a backer of McLear for a while now (since their Kickstarter NFC Ring campaign) and I love this payment ring. In a word, it's fantastic. It works exactly as you'd hope when paying for items via contactless, and it looks and feels good while doing it. The hardware is a solid 5/5! Absolutely nothing to fault. ----- The app is fine. Nothing special. It allows you to perform the bare minimum number of functions to manage your ring (balance/transactions/deactivate/topup etc.). However, it doesn't offer anything beyond what I would consider "essential functionality". ----- As much as I love this product and showing it off - I no longer actually use this on a day-to-day basis. I like to track my spending and I use Monzo to do this. This ring is essentially just a fancy top-up card and has no ability to integrate with any other services. You cannot pay for things online or transfer money, you cannot view transactions outside the Ring Pay app, and you cannot automatically pull money from an account at the time of purchase (it must be topped up prior to a transaction). Most importantly (for me), I can't see my spending inside the Monzo app. It just shows up as £30 top-ups to the ring. This removes any of the convenience that having a wearable payment accessory brings, and I'm left wanting to go back to my phone or smartwatch for payments. ----- I could see myself using this for a night out where I want to limit my spending, but let's be honest, I'm taking my phone and wallet anyway, so that's not going to stop me after a couple of drinks. ----- Ultimately, in order for this product to expand and succeed, McLear needs to work with other fintech companies to integrate their product into other services. Only then, will this be a truly useful product and not a gimmick to show off to your friends. ----- One last note. I have previously criticized McLear for their irregular communication and lack of roadmap. However, they have handled the recent Wirecard scandal very professionally with regular comms. Please keep this up! It shouldn't take a pandemic and an FCA imposed suspension to increase the comms between your customers and the team working on new features.

★★☆☆☆ The Ring is great. However, after the last update, I received an email and a message through the app telling me I had to re-submit my payment details, and guess what, I have tried several times to update this and now the app is stuck on processing payment with the details not updating. Update after 3 attempts finally got my payment details added again. If Clear are going to make changes, maybe the developers should robustly test them before they release the update.

★★☆☆☆ Good idea, bad execution. I'm here, right after payment was declined 3 times forcing me to pull my phone to make those payments. I've been here before, ring not working, thinking about engaging technical support, blah, blah, blah. So question is why should I continue to do this? And I can't answer to myself satisfactorily. Ring is a cool gadget, a conversation starter, but when it stops working it just becomes a pain, a pain I don't need in my life since I can just use my phone.