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: Practical Uses of Big Data in Financial Services

All data managers are concerned about big data and what it means for them, but there’s little in the way of practical advice for how to make the most of the opportunities it may bring. We delve into some real-life examples of how big data can be used at financial institutions to ease data management...

BLOG

Trading Up: Helping Our Youngsters Get What We Do

By Andrew Delaney, President, A-Team Group. We hear it time and time again – at our conferences, on our roundtables and from our advisory boards: our beloved financial data and technology industry is suffering from an acute skills shortage. Flip to the other side of the coin, and employers and parents alike fret about the...

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

Applications of Reference Data to the Middle Office

Increasing volumes and the complexity of reference data in the post-crisis environment have left the middle office struggling to meet the requirements of the current market order. Middle office functions must therefore be robust enough to be able to deal with the spectre of globalisation, an increase in the use of esoteric security types and...