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: Adding value and improving efficiencies in sanctions screening

Sanctions have been headline news this year. They are growing in number, sanctions lists are changing on a daily basis, and there can be conflict between sanctions issued by different jurisdictions – the whole calling for financial institutions to optimise sanctions screening to reduce risk and avoid potentially punitive penalties of non-compliance. This webinar will...

BLOG

A-Team Group Announces Winners of RegTech Insight Awards Europe 2026

A-Team Group has announced the winners of its RegTech Insight Awards Europe 2026. The awards recognise both established providers and innovative newcomers providing RegTech solutions to capital market participants that significantly improve their ability to respond effectively to evolving and increasingly complex regulatory requirements. This year’s RegTech Insight Awards Europe included categories spanning the regulatory...

EVENT

RegTech Summit New York

Now in its 10th year, the RegTech Summit in New York will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the North American capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to drive innovation, cut costs and support regulatory change.

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...