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: Entity identification and client lifecycle management – How financial institutions can drive $4 billion in cost savings

A new model in Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) issuance has created significant opportunities for financial institutions to capitalise on their KYC and AML due diligence. By becoming Validation Agents and obtaining LEIs on behalf of their clients, financial institutions can enhance their client onboarding experience, streamline their internal operations, and open the door to new,...

BLOG

A-Team Group Announces Winners of the Data Management Insight Awards – USA 2026

A-Team Group today announced the winners of its annual Data Management Insight Awards – USA 2026, celebrating outstanding vendors, service providers, and consultancies delivering innovative data management solutions to North American capital markets. Now in its sixth year, the awards recognise both established market leaders and groundbreaking newcomers across more than 40 categories, including Best...

EVENT

Data Management Summit New York City

Now in its 16th year, Data Management Summit (DMS) NYC returns on September 17th 2026, to explore how to use data and AI to drive measurable business outcomes – reliably, repeatedly and at scale.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2026 – Fourteenth Edition

Welcome to the fourteenth edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook. Supervisors increasingly expect firms to demonstrate which rules apply, which data supports each obligation, who owns the control and how exceptions are identified and resolved. Policies and implementation programmes must now be supported by records that can withstand regulatory scrutiny. This edition examines material...