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: The Global LEI System – Putting the Pieces in Place

This webinar has passed, but you can view the recording here. The Regulatory Oversight Committee has sustained development of the global legal entity identifier system – or GLEIS – over the summer months, most recently endorsing pre-Local Operating Units in China, Argentina, Poland and Italy to make a total of 13 units worldwide that are...

BLOG

Seven 2026 RegTech Outlooks for Compliance, Reporting and Financial Crime

As 2026 gets underway, RegTechs are positioning for a shift in regulatory emphasis from refits, rewrites and attestations to demonstrable evidence. Across the jurisdictions supervisors are shifting from consultation and rulemaking into validation and testing whether firms have operationalised reforms through governance, high-quality data, defensible controls and credible evidence. The seven RegTechs that follow have...

EVENT

Digital Assets & Tokenisation Forum, New York

A-Team Group’s Digital Assets & Tokenisation Summit spotlights how global financial leaders are rapidly embracing programmable tokenised assets and DLT networks to achieve real-time, 24/7 peer-to-peer transactions.

GUIDE

Enterprise Data Management Europe 2010

he US may seem to be ahead of the rest of the world in terms of championing the data management cause with the inclusion of reference data focused items in the Dodd-Frank Act, but Europe is not too far behind. Senior European level officials such as European Central Bank (ECB) president Jean-Claude Trichet have taken...