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: Data Science & Analytics – New approaches and capabilities for driving business analytics

Financial institutions are under pressure to maximise the insight they can derive from their data. With data spread across multiple silos and stored in both structured and unstructured formats, embedding analytics into business processes can be difficult and calls for new approaches to data management. Open source database and data processing technologies, as well as...

BLOG

Reframing Corporate KYC: Encompass Targets Back-Book Exposure with Scalable EC Review

For many SME focussed banks, KYC investments have streamlined the onboarding journey but legacy KYC records – the back-book – often remain dormant until a regulatory inspection, or an enforcement case at a peer institution, forces a wholesale review. The challenge that follows is how to remediate at scale, with urgency, and without the need...

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

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...