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: The Global LEI System – A Solution for Entity Data?

This webinar has passed, but you can view the recording here. As 2013 comes to a close, the global legal entity identifier system – or GLEIS – will have been in the making for 18 months. This year has seen some significant developments ranging from the first meeting of the Regulatory Oversight Committee to a...

BLOG

A-Team Group Announces Capital Markets Technology APAC Awards 2026 Winners and Launches ‘State of the Market’ Report

A-Team Group today announced the highly anticipated winners of the Capital Markets Technology APAC Awards 2026. These prestigious awards celebrate the most innovative solution providers and financial institutions that are reshaping the capital markets technology landscape across the dynamic Asia Pacific region. In conjunction with the awards, A-Team Group has also launched the “State of...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit New York

Our TradingTech Summit in New York is aimed at senior-level decision makers in trading technology, electronic execution, trading architecture and offers a day packed with insight from practitioners and from innovative suppliers happy to share their experiences in dealing with the enterprise challenges facing our marketplace.

GUIDE

Enterprise Data Management

The current financial crisis has highlighted that financial institutions do not have a sufficient handle on their data and has prompted many of these institutions to re-evaluate their approaches to data management. Moreover, the increased regulatory scrutiny of the financial services community during the past year has meant that data management has become a key...