About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

John Randles Takes the Lead at Siren

Subscribe to our newsletter

After leaving the post of CEO at Bloomberg PolarLake in August 2017, John Randles has emerged as CEO of Siren, a Dublin-based start-up dedicated to the development of a data intelligence platform that combines search, business intelligence, graphic and knowledge representation to advance how financial services firms, among others, address complex questions.

The company’s platform is based on semantic technologies and is designed to provide a unifying layer on top of big data infrastructure tools, such as Hadoop and Solr, and deliver search, semantic drill down, global joins and advanced graphing capabilities. Financial use cases include fraud detection, risk management, opportunity discovery and Know Your Customer (KYC).

Siren was founded in 2011 as a spin-off of the Data Intensive Infrastructure research group at the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG). Search engine research at the university created the first generation Semantic Information Retrieval Engine (SIREn) and other techniques to index, understand and reuse 30 billion knowledge graphs created by crawling the ‘web of data’.

Siren is Randles’ third start-up having previously set up Eontec and PolarLake. Eontec was acquired by Siebel Systems, which was acquired by Oracle, and became the core of the Oracle financial services offer. PolarLake was acquired by Bloomberg and became the heart of the company’s data management utility. Siren, says Randles, has the potential to be ‘the biggest by far’.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: How to apply innovative e-comms surveillance whilst ensuring control, compliance and enhanced productivity

Remember the days when email was the predominant media for electronic communications within and among financial institutions? Fast forward to today, and email represents a declining fraction of these e-comms, many of which are hosted by modern collaborative platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack, and Zoom, and all of which are subject to surveillance....

BLOG

ThetaRay Extends Agentic AI into AML Investigations with Ray

As regulatory expectations around anti-money-laundering (AML) effectiveness continue to rise, many financial institutions are finding that the greatest operational pressure now sits in investigations rather than detection. While transaction monitoring models have advanced, the downstream work of reviewing alerts, assembling evidence and documenting decisions remains labour-intensive and difficult to standardise. ThetaRay is addressing this challenge...

EVENT

AI in Data Management Summit New York City

Following the success of the 15th Data Management Summit NYC, A-Team Group are excited to announce our new event: AI in Data Management Summit NYC!

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2025 – Thirteenth Edition

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook, a unique and practical guide to capital markets regulation, regulatory change, and the data and data management requirements of compliance across Europe, the UK, US and Asia-Pacific. This year’s edition lands at a moment of accelerating regulatory divergence and intensifying data focused supervision. Inside,...