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: What the LEI Means for your Firm

This webinar has passed, but you can view the recording here. This A-Team Webinar looks at the implications of the emerging legal entity identifier (LEI) for financial institutions as they address how to implement the new standard, and offers suggestions on best practices as the LEI becomes available. The industry initiative to develop and promote...

BLOG

A-Team Group Announces Winners of the 2025 RegTech Insight Awards (USA)

A-Team Group is delighted to announce the winners of the 2025 RegTech Insight Awards USA, recognising the leading providers of RegTech solutions, and consultancy services for capital markets across North America. Spanning more than 30 categories, the 2025 awards programme recognised excellence across a wide range of regulatory compliance solutions and services. A-Team Group also presented...

EVENT

AI in Data Management Summit New York City

Following the success of the 15th Data Management Summit NYC, A-Team Group are excited to announce our new event: AI in Data Management Summit NYC!

GUIDE

Institutional Digital Assets Handbook 2024

Despite the setback of the FTX collapse, institutional interest in digital assets has grown markedly in the past 12 months, with firms of all sizes now acknowledging participation in some form. While as recently as a year ago, institutional trading firms were taking a cautious stance toward their use, the acceptance of tokenisation, stablecoins, and...