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: ESG standards and taxonomies – A progress report

The development of ESG reporting and disclosure standards and taxonomies has progressed rapidly over the past few years, yet there is still no certainty on whether there will ever be measures that can be applied on a global basis. The EU leads the way in terms of ESG investment and regulation, ahead of Asia-Pacific and...

BLOG

The FCA’s Wakeup Call: Mature Financial Controls, Immature Trade Controls

By Becki LaPorte, Principal – AML Strategy & Innovation, FinScan. The FCA’s latest report on sanctions systems and controls delivers a verdict that compliance professionals will find both encouraging and concerning. Although financial sanctions programs have matured, trade sanctions compliance has not. The gap between the two is significant and the report highlights this clearly....

EVENT

RepRisk Sustainability Breakfast Roundtable London

The London sustainability breakfast is part of the global roundtable thought leadership event series hosted by RepRisk in key markets, including, New York, Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Hong Kong and Singapore in 2026.

GUIDE

A-Team Group’s Valuations Vendor Directory 2009

An indispensable guide to valuations professionals seeking providers of services in the asset valuations market. A-Team Group’s latest release in its series of directories – available for FREE download – focuses on vendors of valuations data, models and analytics. But this is not just another list of firms with their telephone numbers – you can get that...