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: GenAI and LLM case studies for Surveillance, Screening and Scanning

As Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) move from pilot to production, compliance, surveillance, and screening functions are seeing tangible results – and new risks. From trade surveillance to adverse media screening to policy and regulatory scanning, GenAI and LLMs promise to tackle complexity and volume at a scale never seen before. But...

BLOG

FinCEN Overhauls AML and CFT Rules with a New Effectiveness Standard

Published April 7, 2026, FinCEN’s latest Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) is a sweeping overhaul of anti-money laundering (AML) and countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) programmes, recasting them around effectiveness, risk-based design and the fight against illicit finance. “For too long, Washington has asked financial institutions to measure success by the volume of paperwork...

EVENT

Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference, London, hosted by A-Team Group

Now in its 8th year, the Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference managed by A-Team Group, is the premier content forum and networking event for investment firms and hedge funds.

GUIDE

The Global LEI System – A Solution for Entity Data?

The Global LEI System – or GLEIS – has been in development since the middle of last year. Development has been patchy at times, but much has been done, leaving fewer outstanding issues, but also raising new questions. What’s emerging is a structure for the GLEIS going forward, complete with a mechanism for registering and...