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: Market Data in the Cloud: Fuelling the next generation of data delivery solutions

Moving market data and infrastructure to the cloud has accelerated in recent years as financial firms have acknowledged the benefits of data accessibility, scalability, efficiency and the possibility of reducing sometimes sky-high costs of sourcing and managing the data. Market data in the cloud also offers a low-cost development environment and is finding use case...

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

Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference, Fall, New York, 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

Fatca – Getting to Grips with the Challenge Ahead

The industry breathed a sigh of relief when the deadline for reporting under the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca) was pushed back to July 1, 2014. But what’s starting to look like perhaps the most significant regulation of the next 12 months may start to impact our marketplace sooner than we think, especially...