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: General Data Protection Regulation – Where are we now?

The compliance deadline for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is approaching fast, so what operational changes should you be prioritising now and how can you implement data management to support these changes? Also, what are the most complex issues outstanding, are more problems expected to emerge once GDPR is in action, and how can these...

BLOG

Eight RegTech Providers Tackling Sanctioned Securities and Financial-Instrument Screening

Sanctions screening in capital markets and treasury extends beyond conventional checks on payments, people and legal entities. Firms need to identify exposure inside securities, issuers, funds (including ETFs), indices, structured products, derivatives and custody positions. They also need to track changes as sanctions regimes, ownership structures and instrument composition shift. That creates a different control...

EVENT

Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference, Spring, New York, hosted by A-Team Group

Now in its 9th 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...