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: How to make the most of market data

Market data means different things to different organisations, it can be extremely expensive, and often comes with limited licensing contracts. It must be carefully sourced, governed, quality checked, and integrated. And it must be fit for purpose across a number of applications as it is increasingly used to not only meet regulatory obligations, but also...

BLOG

Sanctions Data Has Outgrown the Systems Built to Manage It

By Marion Leslie, Head of Financial Information, Executive Board Member, SIX. For as long as anyone in the industry can remember, sanctions in financial instruments representing holdings in sanctioned legal entities have been treated as a very specialist concern. They sat with compliance teams and were largely invisible to day-to-day market activity. The issue is...

EVENT

RegTech Summit London

Now in its 10th year, RegTech Summit London will bring together the RegTech ecosystem to explore how the European capital markets financial industry can leverage technology to innovate the compliance function and response.

GUIDE

FRTB Special Report

FRTB is one of the most sweeping and transformative pieces of regulation to hit the financial markets in the last two decades. With the deadline confirmed as January 2022, this Special Report provides a detailed insight into exactly what the data requirements are for FRTB in its latest (and final) incarnation, and explores what needs to be done in order to meet these needs on a cost-effective and company-wide basis.