Where are they now? IT visionary Derek Goh on life after Challenger

Derek Goh was chief information officer at Challenger Financial Services from 2004 to 2009 and before that headed up information services at Colonial First State. After his father passed away in 2007, he decided to use his IT and entrepreneurial skills to found an online service that would help grieving families celebrate the life of their loved ones.

Why did you leave financial services?

My father passed away in August 2007 and a Google search for a memorial page left me disappointed. I could not find an online memorial that was decent enough to honour him.

With an IT background and coming from a big humble family, I thought it would be great to preserve memories of our loved ones for the benefit of future generations. It is the norm for celebrities to have biographies but ordinary people have many hero or heroine stories too.

I also noticed that the memorial park (cemetery) was divided into sections based on community faiths such as Catholic, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish etc. My family is comprised of various faiths, and it seems, when our time comes, we might be buried in different places. I thought, perhaps we might be separated physically, but virtually, we can be all together in the same place.

My motivation to start a respectful online space to remember our loved ones then began.

Where are you now? I am the founder of HeavenAddress, which is Australia's largest online memorial commumity. HeavenAddress is also a leading online memorial community in New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia and the United Kingdom.

In what way is your current role different to your previous role/s?

Creating an online memorial community is a most humbling and fulfilling undertaking for me. Every day, we receive messages of thanks from family and friends of loved ones.

What do you like about your current role?

The influence that HeavenAddress has on the way funeral services are conducted and the way we remember our loved ones. Since our establishment, many other online memorial and obituary websites in the world have lifted the bar in limiting inappropriate advertisements and improving their functionality. It is exciting to be able to make a difference possible at the world scale and set the standard for the online memorial community.

What did you learn in financial services that has helped you in your current role/s?

I have learnt the adoption cycle of digital and social innovations and have gained experience in building robust, secure and scalable industry strength platforms.

What do you miss about financial services?

Friends

Would you go back to an executive role in financial services?

The funeral industry already has elements of financial service products and I suspect these products will play far greater roles in providing choice of providers and funeral arrangement options for consumers in the future