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: Proactive RegTech approaches to fighting financial crime

Financial crime is a global problem that costs the economy trillions of dollars a year, despite best efforts by financial services firms, regulators, and governments to stem the flow. As criminals become more sophisticated in how they commit financial crime, so too must capital markets participants working to challenge criminality and secure the global financial...

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

RegTech Summit New York

Now in its 10th year, the RegTech Summit in New York will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the North American capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

GUIDE

Data Lineage Handbook 2019

Welcome to our latest handbook on data lineage, a critical concern for data managers working to achieve regulatory compliance, deliver operational gains, and provide meaningful value to the business. The handbook covers the complete scope of data lineage, with a view to helping you win management buy-in and budget, decide whether to build or buy...