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: Approaches to managing corporate actions data

Corporate actions data is key to high quality reference data, which in turn is key to efficient and effective data management processes that support not only regulatory compliance, but also business initiatives. So, how best can corporate actions data be managed, what challenges does it present, and what solutions are available to help financial institutions...

BLOG

smartKYC QnA: Accelerating Due Diligence at Scale

Hugo Chamberlain is the chief commercial officer of UK-based smartKYC, which has been automating the KYC process since 2014. Data Management Insight spoke to Hugo to find out how the company is helping financial institutions streamline their onboarding processes. Data Management Insight: Hello Hugo. When was smartKYC created and how does it serve financial institutions?...

EVENT

AI in Capital Markets Summit London

Now in its 3rd year, the AI in Capital Markets Summit returns with a focus on the practicalities of onboarding AI enterprise wide for business value creation. Whilst AI offers huge potential to revolutionise capital markets operations many are struggling to move beyond pilot phase to generate substantial value from AI.

GUIDE

FATCA – The Time to Act is Now

The US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act – aka FATCA – raised eyebrows when its final regulations requiring foreign financial institutions (FFIs) to report US accounts to US tax authorities were published last year. But with the exception of a few modifications, the legislation remains in place and starts to comes into force in earnest...