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: Data standards and global identifiers update

Data standards and global identifiers are the international language of capital markets – but how widely have they been adopted, how useful are they in practice, and can they stand the test of sustaining stable markets? This webinar will review data standards and global identifiers available in capital markets, discuss their adoption, and consider best...

BLOG

A-Team Group Announces Winners of RegTech Insight Awards Europe 2026

A-Team Group has announced the winners of its RegTech Insight Awards Europe 2026. The awards recognise both established providers and innovative newcomers providing RegTech solutions to capital market participants that significantly improve their ability to respond effectively to evolving and increasingly complex regulatory requirements. This year’s RegTech Insight Awards Europe included categories spanning the regulatory...

EVENT

Eagle Alpha Alternative Data Conference, Fall, New York, 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

The Reference Data Utility Handbook

The potential of a reference data utility model has been discussed for many years, and while early implementations failed to gain traction, the model has now come of age as financial institutions look for new data management models that can solve the challenges of operational cost reduction, improved data quality and regulatory compliance. The multi-tenanted...