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: How to make outsourced infrastructure work for trading

Transitioning from in-house to outsourced trading infrastructure is a significant challenge, but it can offer sizeable benefits including reduced costs, improved performance, access to diverse liquidity sources, and ability to stay abreast of technology changes. This webinar will discuss practical approaches to planning and implementing outsourced infrastructure for trading, the potential of hybrid solutions, and...

BLOG

FCA and Turing Institute Collaborate on Synthetic Data to Advance AML Detection

The Financial Conduct Authority has published a research note from its synthetic data anti-money laundering project, an initiative that began in autumn 2024 and was developed with the Alan Turing Institute, Plenitude Consulting, and Napier AI to create a synthetic dataset for AML detection testing. The paper marks the culmination of that work to date...

EVENT

TEST Event page 1

Now in its 15th year the TradingTech Summit London brings together the European trading technology capital markets industry and examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

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...