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: Re-architecting the trading platform for interoperability, resilience and profitability

Trading platforms have come a long way since the days of exchanging paper certificates and shouting across trading floors, pits and desks in the early 2000s, but there is progress still to be made as firms strive to reduce risk, increase profitability, and make their mark in digital assets trading. This webinar will review the...

BLOG

FinCEN Overhauls AML and CFT Rules with a New Effectiveness Standard

Published April 7, 2026, FinCEN’s latest Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) is a sweeping overhaul of anti-money laundering (AML) and countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) programmes, recasting them around effectiveness, risk-based design and the fight against illicit finance. “For too long, Washington has asked financial institutions to measure success by the volume of paperwork...

EVENT

AI in Capital Markets Summit London

Now in its 3rd year, the AI in Capital Markets Summit returns with a focus on the practicalities of onboarding AI enterprise wide for business value creation. Whilst AI offers huge potential to revolutionise capital markets operations many are struggling to move beyond pilot phase to generate substantial value from AI.

GUIDE

The Data Management Challenges of Client Onboarding and KYC

This special report accompanies a webinar we held on the popular topic of The Data Management Challenges of Client Onboarding and KYC, discussing the data management challenges of client onboarding and KYC, and detailing new technology solutions that have the potential to automate and streamline onboarding and KYC processes. You can register here to get immediate...