About a-team Marketing Services
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: Reviewing the Latency Landscape and the Next Generation of Ultra-Low Latency Infrastructure

Ultra-low latency is no longer the preserve of a handful of proprietary trading firms. As new asset classes electronify, data volumes surge, and regulatory expectations around execution quality and resilience tighten, the performance demands on trading infrastructure are broadening across sell-side desks, electronic market makers, and an expanding range of buy-side participants. The technology landscape...

BLOG

UBS AML Enforcement Exposes Underlying Data Weaknesses

A coordinated US enforcement action against UBS Financial Services has exposed how incomplete data feeds, faulty system configuration and weak customer-risk controls can undermine an automated anti-money laundering (AML) programme. FINRA found that UBS failed to monitor adequately more than 60,000 foreign-currency wires worth over $10 billion between January 2019 and June 2023. The deficiencies...

EVENT

RegTech Summit London

Now in its 10th year, RegTech Summit London will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the European capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to innovate the compliance function and response.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2026 – Fourteenth Edition

Welcome to the fourteenth edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook. Supervisors increasingly expect firms to demonstrate which rules apply, which data supports each obligation, who owns the control and how exceptions are identified and resolved. Policies and implementation programmes must now be supported by records that can withstand regulatory scrutiny. This edition examines material...