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: Best practices for regulatory reporting

Regulatory reporting has been a cost and resource burden for financial institutions for many years, with the race to compliance in a highly regulated market often leading to multiple, singular regulatory reporting solutions. Legacy systems add to the challenges of making reporting changes in line with adapted and new regulations. This webinar will address these...

BLOG

What an Actimize Sale Might Mean for Surveillance and FinCrime Technology

When news emerged that NICE is preparing to sell its Actimize division – long regarded as one of the most established full-stack platforms for financial crime, fraud, and surveillance – the immediate headlines focused on valuation. With reports suggesting a price in the range of US$1.5–2 billion, the deal would be one of the RegTech...

EVENT

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

Now in its 8th 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

Valuations – Toward On-Demand Evaluated Pricing

Risk and regulatory imperatives are demanding access to the latest portfolio information, placing new pressures on the pricing and valuation function. And the front office increasingly wants up-to-date valuations of hard-to-price securities. These developments are driving a push toward on-demand evaluated pricing capabilities, with pricing teams seeking to provide access to valuations at higher frequency...