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: Are you ready for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)?

The data management challenges of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are significant and must be tackled soon to ensure compliance in just over a year on 25 May 2018. The regulation makes many extensions to existing European data privacy rules, adds new obligations and pitches fines for non-compliance at up to 4% of turnover. Listen...

BLOG

Regulator-First AI: Vivox Brings Atomic Workflows to Compliance Operations

Artificial intelligence has become a default talking point in financial crime compliance. Yet for many regulated firms, particularly those operating across capital markets, payments, and treasury functions, the challenge is no longer whether AI can be used, but whether it can be deployed in a way regulators will accept. For Vivox AI, a young company...

EVENT

ExchangeTech Summit London

A-Team Group, organisers of the TradingTech Summits, are pleased to announce the inaugural ExchangeTech Summit London on May 14th 2026. This dedicated forum brings together operators of exchanges, alternative execution venues and digital asset platforms with the ecosystem of vendors driving the future of matching engines, surveillance and market access.

GUIDE

Entity Data Management Handbook – Fourth Edition

Welcome to the fourth edition of A-Team Group’s Entity Data Management Handbook sponsored by entity data specialist Bureau van Dijk, a Moody’s Analytics company. As entity data takes a central role in business strategies dedicated to making the customer experience markedly better, this handbook delves into the detail of everything you need to do to...