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: How to establish data quality and data governance for analytics

Data quality has been a perennial problem for financial institutions for many years, but this needs to change as firms become increasingly reliant on accurate analytics to deliver business opportunity and competitive advantage. New approaches to data quality can help firms up their game and significantly improve their analytics capability. Adding the processes, controls and...

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

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology London 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

Entity Data Management & the LEI

Just over a year since the Financial Stability Board handed over leadership and direction of the interim Global Legal Entity Identifier System – or GLEIS – to the Regulatory Oversight Committee (ROC) of the LEI the entity identifier is being used for reporting under European Market Infrastructure Regulation. This report discusses recent developments in the...