What happens when a loan app funds cash that never becomes debt?

by BIEN Asia Pacific, Tyler Prochazka | Aug 10, 2026 | Opinion

Gogolook’s JUJI and UBI Taiwan will give three people NT$10,000 a month for a year.

At the launch of the Life Rewrite Project, I asked the audience what real freedom means. Is true freedom possible if you cannot afford basic necessities? This project from UBI Taiwan and JUJI, a Taiwanese loan app, is going to provide a ‘basic income’ to three recipients for a year to see if unconditional cash improves their freedom to build a better life.

For Taiwan’s youngest generation entering the workforce, they often do not feel they have the freedom to pursue their passions or start a family because of stagnating wages. This feeling may be only compounded by recent advances in automation.

Basic income advocates ask: What could a person do for himself, his family and Taiwan if he did not have to keep fearing tomorrow?

Henry Lee, UBI Taiwan’s head of policy and public relations, gave the same question a number: What would change if NT$10,000 arrived every month for the next 12 months? He said the money might cover tutoring, emergency medical costs, or simply buy back time from nonstop delivery work. JUJI’s internal data, he added, sometimes shows people seeking NT$5,000 at three in the morning, and some applying twice in one month. Those examples are revealing: a need for NT$5,000 at 3 a.m. is a different policy problem from a planned consumer purchase.

The public terms are simple. Three participants will receive NT$10,000 a month for one year, without a work requirement, spending restriction or repayment obligation. UBI Taiwan will follow their experiences over the year and the partners plan an impact report. The direct cash totals NT$360,000. The partners call it Taiwan’s first corporate-sponsored basic-income trial.

The project reaches three people and leaves universality outside the design. Its setup is still revealing: a company whose financial product helps people borrow through emergencies is funding income that never becomes debt.

The contradiction inside the project

For readers outside Taiwan, the organizations need some context. Gogolook is a publicly listed Taipei technology company best known for Whoscall, its caller-identification and anti-scam service. It has expanded from fraud prevention into financial technology. JUJI is its emergency-financing product for people who may lack the documents, income pattern or credit history expected by conventional banks. At the project launch, JUJI placed the product in the context of people caught between scam risks and urgent funding needs.

UBI Taiwan grew out of the first Asia-Pacific basic-income conference I organized at National Chengchi University. Since then, it has produced policy proposals for national legislators, organized public marches, and run a single-parent cash pilot. The organization approaches basic income less as a finished law waiting to be copied than as an institutional direction: cash, regularity, individual control and fewer gates between a person and economic security.

JUJI says it has more than 30,000 monthly active users and has provided more than NT$1 billion in emergency financing over three years. Users under 35 account for nearly 70 percent. The company classifies 55 percent as financially vulnerable, a category that includes people without credit cards, with income below NT$10,000 a month, or without stable earnings. Its most striking number is a 95 percent re-application rate.

That rate can be read two ways. From a product perspective, repeat use can mean trust, retention and access to better terms; Gogolook says nearly 60 percent of returning vulnerable users received improved conditions. From a social-policy perspective, the same number describes recurring insecurity. An emergency that returns every few months may not be an emergency. It may be the ordinary gap between what life costs and what income can reliably cover. Taiwanese technology outlet INSIDE made the paradox clear: a loan platform reaching undercredited users is funding a program that could make some people less reliant on emergency borrowing.

Johnson Ke, head of Gogolook’s fintech business, told reporters that tighter credit supply had not made the need disappear; JUJI’s organic traffic rose roughly 10 to 20 percent. The more durable point is that regulation can change how formal credit is supplied without removing the rent, repair or medical bill that created the demand.

A fair, transparent loan can keep a broken scooter, a delayed paycheck or a medical bill from destroying a month. It can be far safer than an illegal lender or a scam. But credit solves a timing problem by moving future income into the present. It cannot make inadequate income adequate. When borrowing repeats, the bridge is spanning the same hole again and again.

Jiakuan Su, chair of UBI Taiwan, described financial inclusion and basic income as different routes toward the same objective: keeping a temporary shortfall from becoming a vicious cycle. “The choices money creates are not only material,” he said. “They affect relationships and a person’s inner life as well.” The ability to pay without asking a parent, partner or friend is a form of autonomy that household statistics often miss.

A rich economy can still produce poor margins

The project is arriving at a strange moment in Taiwan. The economy grew 8.76 percent in 2025, according to Taiwan’s statistics agency. That was Taiwan’s fastest expansion in 15 years. It is also possible for a country to grow quickly while many households remain one repair away from debt.

The Chinese-language BIEN report on the partnership describes the divide more directly: the gap created by a “K-shaped economy” is becoming a hard-to-articulate pressure for younger people and nonstandard workers, while forms of “invisible poverty” continue to fall through the traditional welfare system. A person can be employed, active in the economy and still have too little margin to absorb a deposit, repair or medical bill. That is the territory between poverty policy and consumer credit where JUJI operates.

The Ministry of Labor reports that recent graduates entering full-time work in 2025 earned an average of NT$39,000 a month and a median of NT$36,000; 17.2 percent started at the minimum wage then in force. The 2026 minimum wage is NT$29,500. The Life Rewrite payment is roughly one-third of that floor. It is large enough to alter a tight budget and too small to substitute for a wage. That distinction matters. It is true that NT$10,000 will not make a person financially secure alone. It asks whether a modest floor changes the decisions available before a crisis becomes irreversible.

In Global Views Monthly, UBI Taiwan described Taiwan’s squeeze through three linked pressures: wages, prices and housing. This points to the distribution problem beneath the growth story. Taiwan’s technology and export sectors can generate extraordinary value while a worker outside those sectors experiences the boom mainly through higher asset prices and a more expensive city.

A second UBI Taiwan essay used the idea of a scarcity tunnel. When money and time are short, attention narrows to rent, bills and the next meal. That narrowing reflects constraint rather than moral failure. A young worker without savings, assets or family support also lacks a margin for error. Taking the first available job, delaying training or staying in a harmful workplace may be rational today and expensive over a lifetime.

The essay’s sharpest phrase was that young people can end up “selling their future too cheaply.” A small cash floor can widen the decision window: two extra weeks to find a better job, enough money for a rental deposit, or a repair paid without rolling debt into the next month can change which opportunities are feasible.

For me, basic income works as an investment in time to learn, the capacity to care, and the ability to try a new job or project. Like education, its return is uncertain. Its practical value is giving people enough margin to survive one failure without losing everything.

At the project launch, I repeated my argument that basic income is an investment in Taiwan’s most valuable asset: its people.

This is why I resist making AI the only case for basic income. AI does add urgency. Entry-level tasks are where young workers build judgment, contacts and a record of competence, and some of those tasks are becoming easier to automate. But basic income should not depend on predicting a job apocalypse. Its strongest argument is that financial security gives people more room to recover, study, and breathe. Technology changes the timeline. It does not create the underlying principle.

Lee has described Taiwan’s semiconductor position as being born on “the oil field of the next generation.” The metaphor contains both pride and warning. A country can sit above an oil field while most citizens own none of it. Taiwan’s distribution question is not only how to protect people from technological disruption, but whether households should hold a direct claim on the productivity built around semiconductors, compute and public investment.

Taiwan has also made direct cash politically ordinary. The government distributed broad NT$6,000 payments in 2023 and NT$10,000 payments in 2025. Neither was basic income because neither was periodic. But they showed that the state can send cash widely, simply and without asking every recipient to prove hardship first. The debate has moved from whether universal cash is imaginable to when it is justified, how often it should recur and whether it should become an institution rather than an event.

What one mother taught us about time

UBI Taiwan’s earlier single-parent pilot is the closest local precedent. Beginning in 2023, a mother raising a son received NT$10,000 a month. During the project she moved, changed jobs and was diagnosed with cancer. The payment later continued at a lower level into a second year. She told Global Views that the most direct effect was “a great sense of security.”

Cash left the cancer, Taiwan’s labor market and the family’s issues untouched. Its effect was narrower: each new shock was less likely to become a second crisis. A predictable transfer meant the household did not have to renegotiate its right to support every month the participant’s job, health or income changed.

At the JUJI launch, I recalled her saying that the payment let her finally breathe. She did not say she had become rich. She described having enough space to care for her child, face illness and think about the next job. That is the form of freedom I mean when I talk about basic income. Freedom is not an inspirational slogan. It is the ability to leave a job that harms you, refuse an unreasonable high-interest loan, or fail once without losing everything.

The single-parent pilot also taught us something uncomfortable about storytelling. I argued at the time that Taiwan did not lack international data; it lacked a local life people could recognize. The documentary film director put the problem more carefully: real life cannot be scripted, and the participant’s illness was a fact, not a convenient plot turn. A human narrative can make an abstract policy legible. It can also turn a recipient into raw material for advocacy.

The lesson is to keep the person more important than the story.

What three lives can reveal – and what they cannot prove

BIEN defines basic income through five characteristics: periodic, cash, individual, universal and unconditional. This pilot uses four; universality remains outside the design. Selection itself changes who applies, how entitlement feels and what social meaning the payment carries. The accurate label is a guaranteed-income pilot inspired by basic income.

The sample size sets another boundary. Three cases cannot produce a national effect size or tell Taiwan what a full UBI would cost. They can reveal mechanisms. The strongest research design is a transparent longitudinal case study: establish a baseline, follow decisions and shocks during the payment year, then continue after the final transfer to study the cliff when predictability ends.

The most useful measures extend beyond total spending. The project should track repeat borrowing, arrears, savings, job changes, work hours, care responsibilities, food and housing security, health interruptions, stress, sleep, family conflict and the ability to refuse unsafe or exploitative work. It should also ask what the money did not change. A cash floor can create room without overcoming a housing market, a disability, a care burden or a weak job match.

One of the most useful recent large cash studies offers a warning against simple redemption stories. OpenResearch followed 3,000 people in the United States for three years; 1,000 received US$1,000 a month and 2,000 received US$50. Recipients were more likely to report budgeting and planning for large expenses, and in the final year they were 14 percent more likely to report pursuing education or job training. The January 2026 employment-paper revision estimates that recipients worked one to two fewer hours a week and were 4.1 percentage points less likely to participate in the labor market. The study found greater use of some medical care, with no measurable improvement in physical health. Spending rose mainly on housing, food and transportation, while the net-worth effect was close to zero.

Those findings show why serious evidence rarely fits a verdict: gains, trade-offs and limits appear in the same dataset. OpenResearch’s own conclusion is the right one for Taiwan to keep in view. Cash is an important part of the puzzle; its effects can be constrained when health care, child care, housing and decent work remain out of reach.

The Life Rewrite Project should therefore tell three true human stories that may not make a perfect redemption arc. Participants may use the money to stabilize rather than transform their lives. They may stay in debt, work less, work more, or make choices the sponsor would not make. Unconditionality means the recipient, not the funder, decides what the urgent problem is.

The real ESG test is whether JUJI can learn something inconvenient

Henry Lee has argued that the partnership could make basic-income experiments part of the social-impact side of corporate ESG and turn the idea into a form of “good business.” I share the ambition. I also think it sets a harder test than ordinary sponsorship.

The strongest version of this partnership is that JUJI is examining whether part of the value created by serving financial insecurity can be used to reduce that insecurity. This is an admirable goal of the company.

The partnership also combines two kinds of visibility. JUJI encounters financial stress when someone asks for emergency help; UBI Taiwan follows what changes after predictable cash enters the picture. That creates a chance to examine the sequence of a crisis. From this, we can better understand what happens first, which choices disappear, and whether the next emergency arrives on the same terms.

Direct cash has one advantage over much corporate social-impact activity: the input is auditable. A participant either received NT$10,000 on schedule or did not. What makes this project especially interesting is that a listed company’s core product, customer base and business logic are being placed in direct conversation with a basic-income organization.

The Chinese-language BIEN report about the project frames the financing question bluntly: how can a basic-income experiment be run without relying on donations? It describes the ambition as a “virtuous cycle in which social good and business coexist,” and asks whether companies can return part of the gains from technological and commercial growth to society, creating room for people under pressure to choose again.

One of its strongest lines concerns what financial systems see: “Change can begin when a person is no longer just a number rejected by a risk model and once again has the chance to choose the course of their own life.” That idea gives the partnership moral force and exposes its governance risk. A company close to emergency borrowing can recognize patterns that a distant donor may miss. The same proximity gives it unusual power over data, selection and the stories told afterward.

Private funding has already carried cash experiments into public debate. UBI4ALL says its global raffles are entirely crowdfunded. Stockton’s SEED demonstration operated on a fully philanthropic US$3 million budget and helped launch Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. Those models show how private money can produce evidence, administrative experience and new political constituencies before government is ready.

They also show why a pilot needs an exit into policy. The Economic Security Project now argues that time-limited demonstrations should feed permanent public systems. Corporate funding adds another test: social success may conflict with the sponsor’s short-term business metrics. If predictable cash lowers emergency borrowing, the movement should count that as useful evidence, even when the result is commercially inconvenient.

The most valuable export from Taiwan may be a reusable governance model. The sponsor funds the transfers; an independent body controls consent, analysis and publication; participants control publicity; and the methods are available for others to test. The UBI Piloters Network was created because findings and failures have too often remained local. Thus, the institutional discoveries from UBI Taiwan’s pilot program give it the potential to provide infrastructure for the broader UBI movement.

From a pilot to an institution

UBI Taiwan’s funding history shows why the source of money matters. A student talent night with Ascent Academy raised thousands of U.S. dollars toward reviving UBI Taiwan’s single-parent program. JUJI adds a different source: a corporation’s operating budget. Neither model creates a right, but both build the administrative experience and public discussion that policy needs before a national system exists.

What to watch is whether the partnership can create a durable model that persists beyond the first cohort.

Taiwan’s recent universal cash programs also left behind payment infrastructure. After the 2025 NT$10,000 distribution, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said it would convert the system into a “basic common platform for government disbursement” for future subsidies, relief and stimulus payments. That administrative inheritance matters: each large cash program makes the next one easier to deliver.

Over the longer term, the bigger question is whether these campaigns affect the policy discussion. A national basic income cannot depend on whether a company has a profitable year, a sympathetic executive or an ESG campaign. Public policy must still decide who receives money, how much, from which taxes or shared assets, and under what legal guarantee.

Corporate pilots are useful because they create operational knowledge and make better institutions easier to imagine. Taiwan’s basic-income politics are already forming through institutions that solve different problems: one-off universal cash, proposed child payments, youth security, and proposals to give citizens a share of public or technology-created wealth. None is a full UBI. Together they move the argument from imported theory toward Taiwanese design.

South Korea offers the clearest regional benchmark. Lee Jae-myung entered the presidency in 2025 after years of supporting youth dividends and a broader “Basic Society.” In 2026, the national government launched a rural pilot for population-decline counties: verified residents receive KRW150,000 each month through 2027 in local gift certificates. The program began in 10 counties. Seven additional counties were selected in June, with payments in those newly selected counties scheduled to begin in August.

The scale and degree of public ownership far exceed Taiwan’s three-person project. The Korean design also restricts where the money can be spent, which is why BIEN says it falls outside its definition of basic income. The ministry has already reported a 4.7 percent population increase and a 13.7 percent rise in new participating merchants in the original counties. Those early administrative movements may reflect migration, registration or other factors and should not be treated as impact estimates.

The two countries are testing different edges of the idea. Korea approaches universality inside selected territories while limiting the payment to local vouchers. Taiwan provides unrestricted cash to selected individuals. Korea has public scale with less freedom over the money; Taiwan has cash freedom with almost no scale.

On momentum, Korea is further ahead. It has a president associated with basic income, a history of youth dividends and a national ministry running a multi-county program. Taiwan’s momentum is more dispersed across one-off universal cash, child-payment proposals, AI and public-wealth debates, civil-society pilots and this corporate partnership. That diversity can bring more sectors into the argument. It can also fragment the idea into vouchers, accounts, charity and branding unless advocates keep the destination clear: a regular individual cash claim backed by public institutions.

This is how I expect basic income to arrive, if it arrives: as a sequence of policies, pilots and funding systems that make economic security normal. The work of advocates is to keep those systems aligned with the principles that matter – cash people can use now, regularity, individual control, universality as the destination, and trust rather than repeated proof of desperation.

The project is called Life Rewrite. Its most credible result may look like a scooter repair that does not become high-interest debt, a parent who can wait two weeks for a better job, or one month in which an emergency remains an event instead of becoming a system.

The payments will end after 12 months. The more important question is whether the logic behind them survives.

Disclosure: I co-founded UBI Taiwan and spoke at the launch of the Life Rewrite Project. Project statistics are company-reported unless otherwise stated. Quotations translated from the launch speeches and panel discussion were lightly edited for readable English. The analysis, limitations and recommendations in this article are my own.

Core sources

• Gogolook newsroom: project terms and company-reported JUJI statistics.
• INSIDE: local fintech and regulatory context; dual interpretation of repeat borrowing.
• UBI Taiwan and NTU iNGO Academy: organizational history and leadership roles.
• Global Views Monthly on youth security and distribution; scarcity tunnel and youth security; and the single-parent pilot and documentary ethics.
• Taiwan statistics agency reporting, Reuters and Taiwan Ministry of Labor starting-pay data; 2026 minimum wage.
• OpenResearch and NBER: mixed-methods findings and the January 2026 employment-paper revision from the three-year U.S. unconditional-cash study.
• BIEN basic-income definition; Taiwan universal cash; AI; public wealth; child payments; and the student fundraiser.

Translation note: English remarks attributed to Tyler Prochazka, Henry Lee, Johnson Ke and Jiakuan Su are editorial translations of Chinese speeches and panel discussion supplied by the commissioning editor. Filler was removed and adjacent sentences were occasionally combined without changing the substance.