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: Best practices for best execution in multi-venue environments

Best execution has long sat at the foundation of trading operations across all market and practitioner types. But the introduction of more onerous best execution requirements under MiFID II has raised the bar, both in terms of dealing with fragmented markets from an operational standpoint and providing evidence of delivery on best execution policies. The...

BLOG

Complex Sanctions Environment Demands Powerful Screening Monitors: SIX Report

Sanctions screening technology has never been more important for financial institutions as new geopolitical and economic threats create the riskiest trading environment in recent history. That is the key finding of a new report, that highlights the need for greater resilience among organisations to the raised threat level faced by the global financial system. In...

EVENT

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology

Buy AND Build: The Future of Capital Markets Technology London examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2025 – Thirteenth Edition

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook, a unique and practical guide to capital markets regulation, regulatory change, and the data and data management requirements of compliance across Europe, the UK, US and Asia-Pacific. This year’s edition lands at a moment of accelerating regulatory divergence and intensifying data focused supervision. Inside,...