A thank you to Amal.. and a vouch for the UK MuchBetter payment conversion!

So I finally had my converted payment chip installed today!

The process was honestly not as bad as I expected; no pain relief, inserted on the knife edge of my right hand. Thankfully my guy was absolutely spot on, and got the chip square into the pocket on the first try with minimal difficulty; I was concerned there would be some rummaging around inside to get it placed just right but nope, right under the stencil.

Tested the chip in packaging before installation, and had a good clean read, and the attached video is from right after the install. Near immediate success! As the swelling increased over the next couple hours, I tried it once more about 3 hours after and got almost as clean of a read again, no issues at all! The guy at McDonalds looked convinced that I hadnt actually paid :joy:

Can’t fault the craftsmanship from Amal to be getting clean reads even with swelling, so very happy with the purchase.

Because I know the topic of UK payment chips is quite common, I’ll go ahead and run through the process for those considering it;

I went with the listed MuchBetter account, the fob cost £10 and was delivered in about a week. Off it went to Amal, and now it’s in me, it has a 5 year expiry, which now that I’ve experienced the install, is definitely worth the less than 1 minute of discomfort. There have been people saying that you can only make 5 purchases before a phone prompt to verify it’s you, but this hasn’t been my experience; I made several test purchases before installation to see what alignment worked best with the readers here, so I’m probably up to 10 purchases total now on it and haven’t been prompted at all.

So if you are UK based and, like me, can’t wait for a more permanent payment solution; this, so far, seems like a very successful 5 year stop gap!

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Just FYI…

  • MuchBetter is pretty aggressive about shutting down conversions, so beware posting any PII that could link back to you… like usernames that match email addresses that might be what you also used to register with MuchBetter

  • Knife edge installs have proven to be somewhat problematic for flex implants, with an unusually high failure rate. This is mentioned in;

Otherwise, enjoy your new HandPay implant :slight_smile:

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I am also going to buy the service and I hope that when they implement it I have the same good experience that you had, fast and thorough. :exploding_head:

Thank you for sharing your experience and encouraging me for your good experience.

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Big delay on an update cos I’m a casual lurker ;p but here we are a year and a half in, and everything is still fine and dandy :slight_smile: still never been prompted for any sort of security checks, still working just fine, in my experience I’d say probably 75% of UK card readers it’ll work with, it’s only the older models that it won’t and I end up in a semi embarrassing situation where the cashier is looking at me like I’m an idiot :sweat_smile:

Ref. Your warning on knife edge placement Amal, again, no issues here; and as a prison officer (and all that comes with it) I’d say its been fairly thoroughly stress tested and all is well, so I still rate your craftsmanship on that front :grin:

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Hi, just wanted to ask, did you have to activate the wearable with your phone before sending off?

I don’t think it matters but it might be a good idea. Test it out. Use it a few times.

As Amal said, I activated mine to test it before conversion. However, to make you fully aware; everything has been perfect with mine until about 3 months ago when my wearable was remotely frozen. After emailing support they told me that it was an issue affecting a large number of wearables and that they expected it to be fixed by spring. Last update I had from them a couple of weeks ago was that they’re still working on a fix; they offered me a replacement (obviously not that helpful to me!) but when I said I’d rather hang on to my original they just said they’ll keep me updated so; make your own choice, this isn’t the first time MuchBetter have had problems (i had to wait several months for my wearable to actually arrive because of other issues they were having a couple of years ago) I got a good 2 years use out of my implant so I’m not super upset but, be aware going in to this that they aren’t the most reliable and your results may vary!

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