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: Solving the data management challenges of FRTB

Despite the compliance deadline of the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB) being pushed back to January 2022 by many national regulators, the time to address the data management challenges of the regulation is now. The webinar will discuss key elements of FRTB – including risk models, liquidity horizons and data sourcing for risk calculations,...

BLOG

A-Team Group Announces Winners of the 2025 RegTech Insight Awards (USA)

A-Team Group is delighted to announce the winners of the 2025 RegTech Insight Awards USA, recognising the leading providers of RegTech solutions, and consultancy services for capital markets across North America. Spanning more than 30 categories, the 2025 awards programme recognised excellence across a wide range of regulatory compliance solutions and services. A-Team Group also presented...

EVENT

Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference, London, 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

MiFID II Handbook

As the 3 January 2018 compliance deadline for Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) approaches, A-Team Group has pulled together everything you need to know about the regulation in a precise and concise handbook. The MiFID II Handbook, commissioned by Thomson Reuters, provides a guide to aspects of the regulation that will have...