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: Pre- & post-trade transparency: quote & trade reporting under MiFID II

MiFID II sets transparency requirements for pre- and post-trade disclosure of order details, along with transaction reporting that identifies reference and post-trade data. The directive’s related MiFIR regulation extends pre-transparency rules to apply to depository receipts, exchange-traded funds, certificates trading on a venue, bonds and structured products trading on a regulated market, and emission allowances...

BLOG

Sumsub and ComplyAdvantage Deepen AML Screening Partnership as Compliance Demands Rise

ComplyAdvantage and Sumsub have partnered to tighten AML screening by combining Sumsub’s verification and monitoring environment with ComplyAdvantage’s Mesh intelligence layer. The result is a more integrated compliance workflow that brings together customer and business verification and screening within a single platform. For Sumsub users, the partnership adds ComplyAdvantage’s screening intelligence directly into existing workflows,...

EVENT

ExchangeTech Summit London

A-Team Group, organisers of the TradingTech Summits, are pleased to announce the inaugural ExchangeTech Summit London on May 14th 2026. This dedicated forum brings together operators of exchanges, alternative execution venues and digital asset platforms with the ecosystem of vendors driving the future of matching engines, surveillance and market access.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2019/2020 – Seventh Edition

Welcome to A-Team Group’s best read handbook, the Regulatory Data Handbook, which is now in its seventh edition and continues to grow in terms of the number of regulations covered, the detail of each regulation and the impact that all the rules and regulations will have on data and data management at your institution. This...